zoe in wonderland

Uncharted Territory: Gina Litherland, Nikola Tesla, and the Eidetic Image

2012-01-23T08:27:00.000-08:00

Queen of Uncharted Territory by Gina Litherland

This post is really an extension of the last post (on the paintings of Madeline von Foerster and the magic that brings animals and plants back from the brink of extinction). One idea explored (again) was that our perception of the world could be defined by a latent image of sorts that we then proceeded to animate in endlessly similar variations throughout our lives; this part is more an exploration of the possibilities of changing that image, which, so, so unfairly, is pretty much cemented into place by your fifth year of life.

In recognizing that image and its power we can alter it, though it takes a lot more effort once we're past those tender years of constant play and imagination and we’re fully immersed--and invested-- in an image. One powerful method is to work with your dreams, lucidly re-entering them and changing aspects, much like moving the furniture around your house to create a more open mood or room for knocking down a wall and putting in widows, etc.

Not good at recalling your dreams? Haven't been successful at achieving lucidity? There are other ways...

The Surrealists tried all types of automatic techniques to allow their subconscious to speak over their egos. There were Exquisite Corpses, which were sentences, poems, stories, or even images put together piece by piece by different players, none of whom could see more than a sliver of what the person before him/her had wrought. Thus your subconscious is directing communication--both how you try to communicate with others and how they respond to you is a result of the way you are perceiving the universe, and it’s interesting to take part in an activity that reminds you that what’s outside your body is affected by this ‘latent image’. You think you just happen to live in the neighborhood where all the jerks are, but tomorrow they could all be different--if you’re able to change that image.

IMAGE: Exquisitely created new mythological creature by Paul Compton and Priscilla Ambrosini
The second half was created with only a sliver of the first half uncovered to aid in the completion.

IMAGE: Lilly-Putians, by Immy and Mark Tattam. Again, this was divided into a top-half and a bottom-half, with only a sliver of the first part exposed to guide the second artist.

Lillyputians were very tiny people created by writer Jonathan Swift in his novel Gulliver’s Travels. Their name became synonymous with being not just tiny in size, but trivial or petty, due to the satirical nature of his work. In the above work, they have surfaced as a result of a top/bottom collaborations: what was a stamen becomes a neck, or the flamboyant hair of a person on a television screen. To me, this image is the evolution of the Lilliputians to something higher. The people are tiny, and their heads are blooms, and the mechanical bits of the bottom merge seamlessly into the flora of the top. Which, when I think about it, is the opposite of how humanity tends to work, at least in the West: we tend to be a bit machine-like with our brains, wanting rules and repeatable experiments and evidence, but a little more animalistic with the body. Here, these beings seem to float—they are not rooted, as plants would be—, and they are further “raised up” by the size of the lovely blooms. Their transition is a transcendence.

If all this seems very professional to you (as it does to me), and therefore difficult to pull off with the necessary sense of ‘play,’ you can try it the way the Surrealists did: by cutting out pieces from magazines and old texts. Someone starts at the top of the page, puts his/her “head”, covers all but a sliver and passes it to the next person.

Or:

Try it with words. Give each a part of speech, in this order: Article, adjective, noun, verb, article, adjective, noun. Everyone writes down his/her word without peeking at the others', then they are put down in order to make a sentence.

From this process, of course, one could take one’s favorite parts of various of these sentences and let his consciousness have a go at continuing on with it, using the so-created surprising metaphors and connections to develop something quite grand. Or…leave it as is.

Another way to let the subconscious speak was/is through the technique of Decalcomania. This is done by slopping paint onto a paper or some other surface and then pressing that paper with another and peeling it off. Or folding the paper in half and pressing to create a mirror image. Or pressing that paper onto your canvas and peeling it off. The result leaves chance impressions that can then be developed into whatever images seem to be wanting to emerge.

IMAGE: lion bicycle created via decalcomania by Oscar Dominguez

Queen of Uncharted Territory by Gina Litherland

For example, Gina Litherland says of her painting process:

"While some of my paintings begin with an idea that I have been ruminating over for some time, or are inspired by a particularly compelling book or folktale, others occur quite spontaneously, beginning with a decalcomania underpainting which suggests forms that emerge and develop into a personal narrative. The act of painting becomes a complete process of revelation. A mysterious narrative emerges, Rorschach-like, from a turbulent, chaotic ground of color and texture. Myths, dreams, memories, and phantoms of pigment suspended in medium are in continuous dialogue with one another. Dormant images ignite slowly, as our eyes adjust to their dark submerged brilliance."

SCHOLAR OF THE DARK ARMCHAIR, by Gina Litherland

"The imagination is a wilderness--liberating, ecstatic, waiting to grow and fly and howl. From a brush dipped in verdigris or terre verte, wilderness waits to creep vinelike over canvases and panels, curling and flowing, collecting on the edges of forms like frost, and sleeping in deep pools of viridian and ultramarine. It grows from poetic associations, unfolding its leaves to reveal shadows and phrases momentarily obscured from view." (Litherland)

It grows from poetic associations.

DON JUAN OF THE WILDERNESS, by Gina Litherland

So once you have an image, revel in it. Make it eidetic. This is key; this is what makes it like a dream, a lucid dream.

Eidetic: adjective: “relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible.” noun: “a person able to form or recall eidetic images.” This word was a German term coined in the 1920s from the Greek eidētikos , which is from eidos, ‘form.’

Those who can see eidetic images claim that they are so real, they can be inspected for newly-discovered detail, as if the object were actually present, and not simply remembered. The object seems to take physical space, to exist again in front of them, but only for them and not those around them--this is an escape from the limits of consensual reality, in a sense; it is a crack in the wall. The eidetic viewer can see what you can’t, and what he/she sees is as much a physical reality, for him/her, as it would be if you could also see it.

You can try to understand this through over-stimulation of your retina. A blinding flash will often leave a thickly present image on the back of your lids of whatever was in the flash--however, the image jumps and leaves too quickly, and you cannot really inspect it. That type of image is only useful to suggest the thickness, the difference in fullness, of what an eidetic sees. A holograph is another way to think about it. The object, not touchable/tangible or physically present, is nevertheless available for true inspection; more detail than you recall about the object, even more than you actually saw (for example, you can go around the object and see its back-side) is present. Another aspect of this image is that the attendant sound and emotive effects are present; if the image (which can be even a lengthy memory of an event) is present, the entire feeling of the experience of that image is present. This is like what happens under hypnosis or a hallucination: you sink into the image, you exist there, where it “was”--that is how you are able to go around the object, or notice new details about the event. It’s how you re-enter a dream lucidly. It is also (I would posit) how one really manages time travel--because remember that what we’re in right now is an eidetic image; no ‘present’ is any more real than another.

In Sinister Yogis, David Gordon White explains the Buddhist meditation concept of anusmrti as a type of remembering; not just any remembering, it is 'remembrance subsequent to,' or 'methodical remembrance': "Here the core of the practice was to so concentrate one's vision on an image of Buddha or a deity as to be able to subsequently and methodically envision the same image without the need for [a] meditation support."

He calls the technique eidetic imaging, and quotes a fifth-century Buddhist text in which a similar type of meditation, kasina meditation, is described: "The meditator then concentrates on the meditation object until an eidetic image of it can be recalled at will whether or not the external object is present. Briefly, this is a means by which external stimuli can be interiorized, a psychotropic technique by means of which all mental activity can be brought to a single point and concentrated there..."

Then White suggests something interesting: that at the time of these writings, the meditators might have been using oil lamps to contemplate religious cave paintings in this manner:

"The walls of a fifth- to seventh-century Buddhist cave shrine at Simsim, in Chinese Turkestan, for example, are painted with representations of the world of humans on its lower walls, with fabulous mountains above these and the firmament with its supernatural powers at the summit of the vault. The Buddha image inside the cave, half enclosed by the stone into which it is cut, is surrounded by a great, flaming halo, a sunburst of light..."

Staring at this recessed image in the light of an oil lamp against the deep black of the darkness of the cave would make the image against your eyelids very strong once you closed your eyes, and it would stay for some time. Practicing like this, one would then hope to be able to call the image up in its completeness at any time, day or night, in any place and in any situation. The image would then become central to the meditator, almost the effect of carrying a saint within oneself.

"...according to Nyaya-Vaisesika philosophy, all memories are exact transpositions of the past onto the present: if one is but capable of remembering, the content of that memory of the past is wholly actualized in the present and is therefore as true and real as other valid cognitions, such as eyewitness perception, and so on."

In Lucid Waking: Mindfulness and the Spiritual Potential of Humanity, Georg Feuerstein also talks about Buddhist masters of this technique:

"We can witness the same kind of astonishing visualization in some meditation masters of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, who are able to construct complex and extraordinarily vivid inner images of various deities and their divine environments...Also, they are able to maintain these visualizations for hours at a time, during which they move deeper and deeper into the mysterious multilevel world of consciousness."

He shows how this type of imaging will then carry over into physical reality:

"Other Tibetan yogis are able to create so much body heat through visualization that they can sit naked at the top of Himalayan mountain peaks and dry wet cloths on their bare skin, melting the snow around them to boot. Since this extraordinary accomplishment has been captured on film, we know that this is not mere legend or wishful thinking."

But it's not just Buddhists; Feuerstein also talks about Nikola Tesla, who (More than Thomas Edison!) created ways to transmit power over long distances without the use of wires.

Feuerstein says: "Tesla was apparently capable of such vivid visualization, or internal imaging, that he could test his electrical machines without having to build or even draw them. He allowed them to run in his imagination, checked in with them regularly, and determined the wear and tear after so many hours of purely imaginary running. He improved his hypothetical machines by making the appropriate adjustments in his mental imagery. When he was satisfied that an invention was running at optimal performance, he would finally set about building it. His mental simulations invariably proved accurate."

Is it even possible that he made them real before they existed? That they worked because first he imagined them working? And what did he create but light and heat and sound via electricity, this magical power (recall Galvini's experiments attempting to re-inject life in corpses via electrical stimulus, and the later stories of Frankenstein) from the universe brought into our homes. He changed the world, through his imaging.

(Publicity photo of Tesla in his Colorado Springs Lab in 1899 by Dickenson V. Alley)

According to Wikipedia:
At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which, for the first time, devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was a historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were fluorescent lamps developed by Westinghouse[59] and single node bulbs. An observer noted:

‘Within the room was suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil. These were about fifteen feet apart, and served as terminals of the wires leading from the transformers. When the current was turned on, the lamps or tubes, which had no wires connected to them, but lay on a table between the suspended plates, or which might be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made luminous. These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Tesla in London about two years previous, "where they produced so much wonder and astonishment".”

At the same fair, Tesla demonstrated the first neon light tubes, and he powered the Exposition itself with AC electricity, which was then proven to be a huge improvement over Thomas Edison’s DC Power. Out of anger, Edison used AC currents to create the first electric chair for New York, in order to show that the type of current Tesla was using was deadly.

It is the type of current we still use, however, and hugely more efficient than DC power; Edison eventually had to concede to that fact, and his company switched over to AC power. Tesla also created the first remote-control devices, and demonstrated the first such radio-controlled boat.

The thing about Tesla is this: he was making , basically, spooky action at a distance. Until he figured it out, you couldn't make a rowboat you weren't touching in any way (ie via wires or your hands) move. It was magic. Recall the Arthur C. Clarke quote about any technology, insufficiently understood being the same as magic. The point here is Tesla was able to imagine doing it, focus on that imagined action, and then pull it out into reality. He changed the world.

At the Velvet Rocket , Justin Ames describes Tesla’s work:

“In 1899, Tesla moved his research to Colorado Springs where he devoted himself to experiments with high voltage and electrical transmission over distances. Here he constructed electrical devices of Dr. Frankenstein proportions, most notably his Magnifying Transmitter, a 52-foot diameter electrical coil that was capable of generating millions of volts and sending lightning arcs 130-feet long. Witnesses claimed that they saw a blue glow like St. Elmo’s Fire emanating from the environs of the laboratory, with sparks emitting from the ground as they walked. On one occasion, a backfeeding power surge blacked out the whole of Colorado Springs.”

As I was noting in the last post, you can’t worry too much about ridicule or the reactions of others...

In his autobiography, My Inventions, Tesla said
"In my boyhood...When a word was spoken to me, the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision, and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not.
...
The theory I have formulated is that the images were the result of a reflex action from the brain on the retina under great excitation. They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed.
To give an idea of my distress, suppose that I had witnessed a funeral or some such nerve-racking spectacle. Then, inevitably, in the stillness of night, a vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist, despite all my efforts to banish it. Sometimes it would even remain fixed in space though I pushed my hand through it.
If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives, and so make it visible (10)."

Now, consider this a ratcheting up of the intensity of the world as you experience it. You see perhaps not a particular funeral but the nightly news, in which things are constantly exploding, dying, being endangered or molested, etc. See how he experiences it with so much intensity, and so he is forced to do something about it. And what does he do?

"To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to achieve it, I had to conjure continuously new images. If was not long before I found that I had exhausted all of those at my command; my 'reel' had run out, as it were, because I had seen so little of the world--only objects in my home and the immediate surroundings....Then I instinctively commenced to make excursions beyond the limits of the small world of which I had knowledge, and I saw new scenes. These were at first very blurred and indistinct, and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention upon them, but by ad by I succeeded in fixing them; they gained in strength and distinctness, and finally assumed the concreteness of real things. I soon discovered that my best comfort was attained if I simply went on in my vision farther and farther, getting new impressions all the time, and so I began to travel--of course in my mind. Every night (and sometimes during the day), when alone, I would start on my journeys--see new places, cities and countries--live there, meet people and form friendships, and meet acquaintances and -- however unbelievable-- it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in real life, and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.
This I did constantly until I was about seventeen, when my thoughts turned seriously to invention. Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I had been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider to be a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental, and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient."

This is important, because this is where he explains what you're doing when you work on the latent image in your mind of the world you want to be able to see versus tinkering with the physical world around you, which is no more than animating the latent image you already carry:

"The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea, he finds himself unavoidably engrossed with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes, and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained, but always at the sacrifice of quality."

The studies in the field of psychiatry that have been done on this subject suggest that children around 7-14 are highly likely to have this kind of memory or imagery, and that adults are highly unlikely to. As you grow, it becomes less spontaneous; you have to try, and the energy/interest doesn’t seem to be there. It would seem that this degeneration of the eidetic ability is a result of our coming to more completely accept what is in front of us (the consensual reality, based upon our ‘latent image’) as the only possibility, thus forgetting the agency we could have. Eidetic imaging is a sign of our agency--for being able to see, fully and in all detail, what the person next to you cannot, and being able to accept that vision enough to take the time to inspect it and acknowledge and believe what you have seen is to recognize that you need not be constricted by consensual reality. If you can see it and inspect it, isn’t the next step simply an additional thickening--just a little bit more than what you already have in front of you, and the objects are physical? And if you can convince the person next to you of your vision, then the fingers will feel it when either of you reaches out to test it: the tactile sense, remember, happens in the mind, which is why an amputee can feel a limb, and why, if that amputated limb then brings him considerable pain, he can relieve it by enacting stretches and exercises of the opposite limb by a mirror, convincing his mind that both sides are doing the relieving exercises.

Unfolding its leaves to reveal...

So enter the image, whatever image you have decided on. Feel all of it, use all your senses. Then start tweaking. In the den of your mind, add a chair. A chair of a color that doesn't match the others. Add a pattern. Change the lighting. Move the table. Did you discover a secret hatch underneath it? Maybe you don't see it yet, but go out into the world now, 'awake', aware, and you will stumble onto a secret hatchway of sorts. When it happens, pay attention. Notice that you have just worked magic, because noticing this boosts your belief in your ability, and that belief boosts your ability.

DINNER PARTY, by Gina Litherland
Then come back and tell me about it. Because the fact that you can do it will help me. :)

Gina Litherland's work came to my attention via Jodi LeBirge at Yew Tree Nights .

Madeline von Foerster and the Impossible

2012-01-09T14:18:00.000-08:00

Above: Self-Portrait, by Madeline von Foerster

If we see what we see and miss what we don’t see because of a perceptual bias, and that perceptual bias is based on cultural lessons and experiential lessons in the first five years of life, then it would seem we are forever trapped in a spiral created by things that occurred long before we realized we had any agency in our own lives. That’s the subconscious, generally perceived to be much more powerful than your conscious, and the entity responsible for subverting all those little chants (I can do this, I can do this) and plans you make in your life. You think you want to do something, but your subconscious thinks differently, and it always wins. Or you think you saw something, but really, your subconscious didn’t agree with what was there, and so it overdubbed the situation (see psych studies of the fallibility of eyewitness accounts).

The coding that your subconscious uses is symbolic. I’ve studied it often through this blog as a latent image, a sort of symbolic painting encapsulating a feeling and a series of relationships that defines how you will interpret your experiences and the world around you. To get an idea of where you are right now, you might capture a dream and pick apart all of the symbols in it--the atmosphere, location (indoors? outdoors?), the colors, the people and their attitudes, the relationships between people, people and objects, objects and objects. As was explored in the last post, architecture, geography, weather--all these things are alive, somehow, they are talking to you and you are talking to them, even though you’re not aware of those conversations. You can explore that notion through your dreams, with the intensified emotions and moods often found there, and then you can change your latent image, your map of your life, by altering pieces of the dream, sinking back into the feeling of the dream, and changing it, consciously. Then it helps to bring that image into the physical world. A painting or a collage with all the representational pieces, plus your alterations...and when you look at it, pause a moment, and feel the change that you made again. Then keep track of the seemingly unrelated changes that begin to take place in your life.

Madeline said about her above self-portrait, “During a previous period of depression in my life, I often experienced a severe sensation of pressure in my cranium. It sometimes felt so unbearable I wished I had a hole in my head! A friend told me, “Maybe you just need to be trepannated!” It was a revelation to discover that this surgery existed and was used therapeutically for centuries.”

In fact, it is a still-used process in cases of traumatic brain injuries, and there are also those who self-trepanate in an effort to reach higher consciousness. In 1965, a Dutchman named Bart Hughes performed this surgery on his own, believing that this act would relieve his brain of cerebrospinal fluid, thus allowing for more blood in the brain, which he theorized would make him some cross between high and enlightened.

In a response to a post on this painting at neurophilosophy.wordpress.com (link to the right in the blogroll), a reader named Morgaine commented: “I’m thinking that to the extent she believed trepanation might relieve pressure, painting it (imaging in such detail) could have tricked her body into thinking she was actually doing a procedure that would lessen pressure on her skull, with her belief/hope (placebo) bolstering her immune system – countering whatever functions may have gone awry contributing to her headache. But also her use of image and attention could have directly changed other facets of physiology such as blood pressure and heart rate…which in turn could have affected her headache.”

Given the choice between Hughes’ method and von Foerster’s...well. Easy choice.

Madeline came back to this post to respond to this idea, and gave another example (more difficult) of the same type of mind-body experience: “The most powerful example of this was when a musician friend asked me to paint the cover art for an album he was making, his own kind of healing catharsis ten years after his wife’s suicide. Even though the image I created was largely peaceful, there was definitely some tension and sorrow in it. During the time I spent on the painting, I experienced horrible sadness, loss, and desolation. If I had had any kind of belief in the supernatural, I would have sworn that I was being inhabited by the woman’s ghost, because I had no great problems in my own life, and the emotions did not feel like my own. But of course it was the manifestation of this imagery/symbolic neurofeedback you describe. By the end of the work I felt a sense of release and peace.”

The idea of being inhabited by the woman’s ghost is such an apt description: we take things into ourselves, much like a haunting. When we focus on a certain feeling, we bring it to life and give it a body to move around in. When we focus on pain, we give pain a body so that it may haunt the world.
(by Madeline von Foerster)

Two major themes of Madeline con Foerster’s work are extinction and preservation. She has series of paintings based on the old Cabinets of Curiosities that were the precursors to the modern museum and on Reliquaries, those icons or statues with openings or drawers for the bones or other personal mementos of saints one finds in cathedrals.

She notes an odd disconnect between those things that are so beautiful, that we love, but that we will drive to extinction in order to ‘own’ them. In a video made about her painting “The Red Thread” (below), she gives an example of that:
“...the bird called the Great Auk that was made extinct a while back and I think when there were something like 40 of the birds left...38 of the were killed for museum specimens.”

I was immediately reminded of the passage in Out of Africa, by Isaak Denisen, in which she kills an iguana to capture the color and flash of its skin, perhaps to make something out of it, and makes an important discovery:

“In the reserve I have sometimes come upon the iguanas, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green, and purple over the stones, the colour seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.

Once I shot an iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale; all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal which had radiated out all that glow and splendour. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the iguana was as dead as a sandbag.

Often since I have, in some sort, shot an iguana, and I have remembered the one in the Reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and embroidered all over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied a little in colour and played in green, light blue, and ultramarine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my own arm than it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colours, the duet between the turquoise and the 'nègre' -- that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin that had created the life of the bracelet.

In the Zoological Museum of Pietermaritzburg, I have seen, in a stuffed deep-water fish in a showcase, the same combination of colouring, which there had survived death; it made me wonder what life can well be like, on the bottom of the sea, to send up something so live and airy. I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and at the dead bracelet. It was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing among graves."

In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To the settlers of East Africa I give the advice: 'For the sake of your own eyes and heart, shoot not the Iguana.'”

Redwood Cabinet, by Madeline von Foerster

Madeline says: “The wooden ‘cabinets’ in my paintings typically represent a single tree species and are filled or surrounded with other species that rely on the tree (or the ecosystem where it grows) for their survival” (Source: Orion, June 2011). Through the glow of her spectacular technique mixing egg tempera and oil paints, and by pulling together as many of the ‘collection’ of interacting entities as she can, she returns color and life, at some level, to these endangered or missing species. This act can have larger consequences than you might think.

Above: The Red Thread, by Madeline von Foerster

The process, to me, ties back in with the whole idea of a latent image: she is re-imagining the world with these beings in it, in full color and vibrancy, and she is reminding us, by showing us their beauty through her wonderful technique, that we love them. In the above painting, The Red Thread, your eye can move left to right, from loss to life, the thread/vein of those now extinct is re-infused with life (perhaps by the bird?) and goes through the arms of the female, and into her lap, from which it trails to living, breathing creatures. I almost like to see the turtle melding with the pelican to create some other, not-yet-know creature, a cryptid, perhaps. There are those who face the world’s ridicule and bravely strike out to seek such cryptids, and to seek out those creatures we believe to be extinct. And sometimes they find them:

“Recently, researchers in Tanzania spotted a Lowe's servaline genet, a graceful, mongoose-like carnivore last seen in 1932, and widely considered to be extinct. Not long before that, the golden-crowned manakin, a South American bird, resurfaced for the first time since its discovery in 1957.” --(Source: When "Ghost" Species Return From Extinction; Scott Wiedensaul;Special for National Geographic News; July 9, 2002)

Above: the genet: Photo: Museo delle Scienze (Trento Museum of Science) as part of the TEAM Network Partnership/ www.teamnetwork.org

Above: the golden-crowned manakin, photo by Fabio Olmos

Above: the rediscovered Fuerte’s Parrot in Colombia. Photo by ProAves Colombia
The Okapi, also believed for a long time to be extinct. Source: http://www.learnanimals.com/okapi/pictures.php
Look at the amazing patterns and color! How could you miss this animal?
...
“On occasion, the ghosts return after an absence that covers not decades, but centuries. The plump seabird known as the cahow, or Bermuda petrel, was considered extinct as early as 1620, eaten out of existence by hungry Europeans who plucked the tame bird from its nest burrows. Yet in 1951, a tiny colony was found on a rocky islet off Bermuda, where they had managed to avoid notice for more than 300 years. Nor is that the most extreme example. In the Canary Islands, a large species of lizard was rediscovered in 1999, a full five centuries after its supposed extinction.” (Wiedensaul)

This is magic: look again. I’ve argued many times here that by seeing a harmful and vicious world, we make it so; by focusing on stories of doom and hatred and the endless cycle of killing, we make those stories stronger and more real. They reverberate in the universe and come back to us, the echo hollow and pained. Magic is where we focus on the story of something else, thereby making it more real. Imagine being the intrepid explorer that insists she will find a new cahow. She wants a world with a cahow in it, and she goes off on the most ridiculous, scientifically unfounded search one can imagine, calling upon herself the ridicule of her entire professional community and anyone else who might happen to pass the television when her expedition is mentioned. She (or he) changed the world.

Nelson’s small-eared shrew; photo by Lazaro Guevara

For 109 years, the shrew was believed to be extinct, until Fernando Cervantes and Lazaro Guevara went searching for it in the forest slopes of the San Martin Tuxtla volcano. To imagine the difficulty of this ridiculously impossible search, take out your ruler. The shrew is less than 10 centimeters long from nose to tail. They live on this volcano, which erupted in 1793, destroying every living piece of vegetation around its crater--vegetation which regrows to be a cloud forest, one characterized by having a persistent canopy-level cloud cover.
Yet they found them. Nelson’s small-eared shrew lives.

One more: for the past 60 years, the Ascension Island parsley fern was believed to be extinct. In 2010, Olivia Renshaw and Stedson Shroud were repelling down the island’s Green Mountain, a steep volcano, when they saw--by chance-- 4 tiny, sickly parsley ferns. What is spectacular about this story is that they were not only able to see this plant, know that they were seeing it, believe it--and see from the image below how tiny it is--
Image by ZUMA press.

but they also were willing to slide down the volcano side, surrounded by safety ropes and the imminent threat of death, twice a week to nurse the plant back to health. Then they collected a few small sample spores to take to London’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where 60 are now growing in cultures.
Wiedensaul ends his article by saying: “This is still a wide and infinitely surprising world we live in, and...conservationists have learned never to say never when it comes to lost species.”

Madeline says something very similar: “It is my hope that art-makers worldwide succeed in our mammoth task -- that of changing the current omnicidal tide of culture -- before everything worth saving on this planet has been razed, or eaten. I believe there is still time to make a new myth. There is still a chance for imagination to rise to power.”
And she is leading in that rise with her work, is she not? Thank you, Madeline.

Perception: The Dark and the Light

2012-01-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

By Clive Hicks-Jenkins

“In the spring of 1962, a Haitian peasant aged about forty approached the emergency entrance of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital at Deschapelles in the Artibonite Valley. He was admitted under the name Clairvius Narcisse at 9:45 P.M. on April 30, complaining of fever, body ache, and general malaise; he had also begun to spit blood. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and at 1:15 P.M. on May 2 he was pronounced dead by two attendant physicians, one of them an American...The body was placed in cold storage for twenty hours, then taken for burial. At 10:00 A.M., May 3, 1962, Clairvius Narcisse was buried in a small cemetery north of his village of l’Estere, and ten days later a heavy concrete memorial slab was placed over the grave by his family.
In 1980, eighteen years later, a man walked into the l’Estere marketplace and approached Angelina Narcisse. He introduced himself by a boyhood nickname of the deceased brother, a name that only intimate family members knew and that had not been used since the siblings were children. The man claimed to be Clairvius and stated that he had been made a zombi by his brother because of a land dispute.”

A series of personal questions were asked of this man, all of which he answered correctly. A copy of the death certificate was taken to Scotland Yard, where the fingerprint “signing” Clairvius’ death certificate was verified as that of his sister Marie Claire. The 1980 version of Clairvius was then definitively identified as the same man who had been buried 18 years earlier (Source: The Serpent and the Rainbow, by Wade Davis).

In seeking a possible pharmaceutical cause for the creation of a zombi, Wade studied the history of Datura: “...throughout medieval Europe witches commonly rubbed their bodies with hallucinogenic ointments made from belladonna, mandrake, and henbane, all relatives of datura. In fact, much of the behavior associated with the witches is as readily attributable to these drugs as to any spiritual communion with the diabolic.A particularly efficient means of self-administering the drug for women is through the moist tissues of the vagina; the witch’s broomstick or staff was considered a most effective applicator. (Our own popular image of the haggard woman on a broomstick comes from the medieval belief that witches rode their staffs each midnight to the sabbat, the orgiastic assembly of demons and sorcerers. In fact, it now appears that their journey was not through space, but across the hallucinatory landscape of their minds.)
That the plant is capable of inducing stupor is suggested in the origins of the name itself, which is derived from the dhatureas, bands of thieves in ancient India that used it to drug their intended victims. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese explorer Christoval Acosta found that Hindu prostitutes were so adept at using the seeds of the plant that they gave it in doses corresponding to the number of hours they wished their poor victims to remain unconscious...A more macabre use was recorded from the New World, where the Chibcha Indians of highland Columbia administered a close relative of datura to the wives and slaves of dead kings, before burying them alive with their deceased masters.” (38)

Then he discovers that the Puffer Fish is involved--remember that in Asia, this is considered quite a delicacy, is highly sought after as a meal, and why? because just a little has a nice effect. More than that can kill you. And yes, several people there have been almost buried alive as a result of eating it, because they appeared, for a time, to be quite dead, even to trained physicians. Most interesting here is that Datura actually ends up being (warning: semi-spoiler) part of what “raises” the corpse from the dead and turns him into a zombie--not what puts him in the ground. One mixture makes the victim to all intents and purposes dead, and the other mixture raises him (or her). This person has now not died--he or she has worse than died: the person so poisoned, in the Japanese cases (where, in one case, a person “came to” on the embalming table) and in the Haitian cases, is aware of everything going on; he simply cannot respond to it. He cannot move. He watches himself being interred. And he knows what has happened.
That part is important. In Haiti, he knows that he has been taken to be a zombie. Because this is part of his culture, part of being Haitian: you know about zombies. You know what happens to them, what they become. And that’s important because, once the person is dragged out of the grave, beaten severely and then dosed with datura (those hallucinations, remember), his belief system swings him right over the threshold, and he--you could almost say willingly-- gives himself over to a lifetime of slavery.

(The zombie is fed; from the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

That’s what I want to talk about here, is the impact of knowledge, in this particular case. I want to talk about Weltanschauung.

Weltanschauung:
This term was well-defined by Freud in his lecture “A Philosophy of Life:”

‘Weltanschauung’ is, I am afraid, a specifically German notion, which it would be difficult to translate into a foreign language. If I attempt to give you a definition of the word, it can hardly fail to strike you as inept. By Weltanschauung, then, I mean an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. It is easy to see that the possession of such a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind. When one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organise one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose.

In English, we have translated the component parts: Welt (world) and Anschauung (Wide-View) to create “World View.” The original Weltanschauung is, however, more all-encompassing and is therefore often used untranslated in English texts.

In his lecture, Freud goes on to mention a contemporary criticism of the Weltanschauung of scientific culture for the narrowness of its field (a criticism he then refutes, but I remain unconvinced by his argument):

...it is distinguished by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is, at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration. It appears that this way of looking at things came very near to receiving general acceptance during the last century or two. It has been reserved for the present century to raise the objection that such a Weltanschauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it overlooks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the needs of the human mind.

Narrowness of one’s Weltanschauung is what creates an empty and unsatisfying life, whether it be this particular narrowness (scientific) or another; this particular narrowness, however, is one that interests me here, because what I would like to claim is that our own intuition and inspiration is the source by which we can improve the world that we’re accepting as real right now. Science, in its mechanics, limits our conception of what’s real to that which can be logically accepted by following the tenets of a belief system already in place. This means that we can’t really change the world, as to do so we would necessarily have to alter some of our beliefs. For example, in a scientific experiment, we are required to be able to reproduce a certain result over and over again. Well, that is of course to remove the possibility of accidents and “coincidence.” But whose life is like a sterile laboratory? What can be repeated in a lab often cannot be repeated in reality, and vice versa. An example of this: a woman’s child is hit and trapped under an automobile. She reaches over and lifts the car off the child. Holding it up with one hand, she pulls her child out from underneath. Could she do that again, for example at a gym, as a repetitive exercise? Only, I would think, if she can, by dint of that singular event in her life, change her total Weltanschauung which includes her beliefs about what a human body is capable of and also her beliefs about what she is capable of. Science uses the fact that she has never before managed such a weight to convince her that it is an accident, and can never happen again. She accepts that postulate because she accepts the Weltanschauung of the scientific world. Why, instead, does she not tell herself: obviously, I am able to lift a car. None of the things that have tired me before should really be tiring to me. I can do much more than I think is possible--I limit myself daily to the activities I think I should be able to do, based on what others tell me.

Yet another example: in labs, there has been quite some difficulty to prove the existence of what we call Extra Sensory Perception. The tests often go something like this: I have a pack of cards. I will lift a card and look at it, and you (wherever you are, probably in another, sealed room) will try to “see” what card I am holding by attaching your sight to mine. Here’s a problem: who cares what card I am holding? It’s a boring task (like bench-pressing cars), and unlikely to stimulate heretofor unused brain cells into fresh activity. Try memorizing a list of 700 names. Can you? Yes. How likely is it? Not very. If, however, the scientist were not trying to create such a particular, repeatable, clean experiment, he would also not be removing any and every reason for the subject to actually try. Whereas again, mothers often “hear” a child’s voice, over many many miles, when that child is in trouble. Science, which once opened doors for us in the process of releasing us from other constricting views, is now busily closing them (ironically, it is doing so in an attempt to look less like the previous constricting views, by proving itself more rigorously real). I will repeat here that Freud does not--or did not, at that time--agree with me. He was very concerned with relegating “illusion” to the field of the unreal as opposed to the field of the not yet real to me, which is squarely where it belongs.

Peter Serwan’s Weltanschauung (Does the scene seem familiar?) (comments?)

In his article, The Microbial Weltanschauung, Elio notes that what we are able to see greatly changes (and has greatly changed) over time. For example, there are many more stars than we ever imagined before the invention and improvement of telescopes. But there are even more prokaryotes:

We now know that bacteria comprise about half the biomass on this planet, a stunning realization. This is not just a numbers game: it is a fundamental shift in how we perceive life on this planet. Suddenly, participation of the prokaryotic cells in the chemical and physical transactions of this planet has taken center stage. Microbes are directly involved in the exchanges of matter via biogeochemical cycles, in shaping the geological landscape, and even in altering the weather. Although some suspected such crucial roles for microbes, such fanciful notions were generally discounted until the new numbers appeared in our consciousness.

In every square centimeter of clean skin on the inside of your elbow, there are about a million bacteria. And they hail from six different “tribes” of bacteria, according to Dr. Julia Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute and her colleagues. An article recording their findings in RedOrbit News states, “Because humans depend on their microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells also outnumber human cells by 10-1, meaning that if cells could vote, people would be a minority in their own body.”

These bacteria help us, and have to be replaced after a round of broad-action antibiotics.

Another lesson in Weltanschauung which we see in our sciences is the opposite end of the bacteria spectrum. In the past,surgeons only rinsed the visible dirt from their hands between patients, and as a result, there were very high mortality rates during childbirth. These mortality rates, oddly, were not nearly as high when a child was delivered by a midwife. Ignaz Semmelweis made the intuitive connection between the other tasks of a surgeon during the day and the negative impact they might have on the health of a mother and her newborn, and he suggested washing hands between patients with a chlorine-lime solution. He was ostracized from the scientific community for his troubles, and later died in an asylum. Why? Because at the time, you couldn’t see bacteria. The visible dirt was washed off with water. It was possible to see a difference in results if a surgeon did wash his hands, but the scientific community scoffed at the very idea, as it did not fit in their Weltanschauung, and so they would not.

So, your Weltanschauung can be very important: it can work in your favor, or it can work against you. We’ve established that. A lot of The Serpent and the Rainbow is about, in its own way, Yin and Yang, the ambivalence of the distinction between good and bad, and the ability of one thing--for example, Datura, or the Puffer Fish--to be both. Not just that there are both, but that there must be: it is necessary to have both a dark side and a light; for there to be both. I was following along with that theory just fine until I came to a passage in which he sketched out certain very difficult images from slavery in US and Haitian history. Then I thought: really? Why is that necessary? What’s wrong, actually, with a world filled to bursting with only light?

And, I had no answer. Except for the one that Agent Smith gives in the first Matrix movie, when he’s talking about the multiple variations of Weltanschauung the machines have given the humans before settling on the current, sort of unpleasant form. He says that they had tried to give the humans a dream of a dream, perfection itself. And we wouldn’t accept it. We kept trying to wake up. (I’d like to read your comments about that)...

(Screenshot from the Matrix)

Now, I want to talk about magic. I’d like to start by quoting pieces of a lecture by Marcel in Michael Gruber’s Tropic of Night, where he talks about how we define magic, and how we disregard it:

A hundred thousand years ago, people with the same sort of brains we all have, speaking languages no less complex, lived, worked, loved, and died. Recorded history, however, begins between eight and six thousand years ago, coincident with the development of agriculture in several regions of the Old World. Before that, a great silence, some ninety thousand years of silence. And so I wonder, what were those people doing with those so excellent brains all those endless days and nights? Not working all the time. Hunter-gatherers in bening climates do not work very hard. Their tools are simply made, as are their shelters. Most hunter-gatherer tribes work fewer hours a week than Frenchmen; far fewer than Americans. So what do they do? This to me, is one of the great tasks of anthropological science, to penetrate the great silence...So I ask you, what would you do, with your marvelous brain, all those centuries? No books, no writing, few man-made things, little pressure from the environment, no television or radio, no newspapers, only the same hundred or so people to talk to? I think you would play with the envirmonment, Homo ludens, after all, and you would become intimate with it. You would invent art, to symbolize this. You would develop an intimacy with your environment so deep that we children of industrial civilization can scarcely imagine it, an intimacy deeper, perhaps, than we have with our lovers or our children, perhaps even deeper than we have with our own alienated bodies. They would be participants in an environment that was alive in the same way that they themselves were alive, whereas we are merely observers of an environment that is dead. All the little particles, yes? Yes. And another thing we would play with would be the most interesting thing in our environment, which is the human mind, our own minds and those of others. And with this, very slowly, centuries and centuries, remember, a technology develops. This technology is based not on the manipulation of the objective world, as our own is, but rather on the manipulation of the subjective world. Now, you may be familiar with the statement by the British scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in which he states: any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. Just so. And what I am proposing is that among traditional cultures there is a sufficiently advanced technology of which we know very little, and what little we do know of it we denigrate, yes? And for want of a better term, we call this magic (88)

At this point in the lecture, the professor performs quite a feat. I will leave it for you to go and read about it, because the whole of the book, as far as I am concerned, is itself a work of magic, and should not be missed.

In its place, though, to put your head in the correct space, I would ask (beg) that you watch this video. Here, you will see magic:

VIDEO: Ted Talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_barry_does_brain_magic.html

After Marcel performs, he comes back to his idea:
“So, let us deconstruct what you have just seen. I am French, therefore I deconstruct. First, all of us bring to this phenomenon a cultural load. We do not observe it objectively; there is no such thing. And this load tells us that there is no magic. What you are observing is merely legerdemain. You cannot tell me how I did it, perhaps, you cannot explain what you saw, but you have utter confidence [in your belief that it is merely a trick].”

That is our Waltenschauung. No magic. How sad is that? But here’s the interesting thing. We keep coming back to magic. Even science, our latest protection against believing in things that the unimaginative and power-hungry know to be dangerously untrue, is heading back in the direction of magic. We have, of course, the new physics. But we also have psychology...we have the study of perception, and dreams (link both of these to previous posts) and we have hypnosis. Gruber’s professor goes on to talk about Shamans who use similar techniques:

Among traditional peoples where the shamanic technologies are well developed, the manipulation of consciousness has advanced to a much higher degree. We have ample evidence that, for example, shamans and sorcerers can enter the dreams of sleeping people and stage-manage the dream state. Sorcerers can elicit in their subjects psychic states that are somewhere between dreaming and sleeping, so that the subject entertains elaborate illusions that seem undeniably real, a kind of induced psychosis [remember the hypnosis experiments]. Sorcerers can play with some skill on the interactions between mind and body, an area in which scientific medicine is almost entirely incompetent. We speak, for example, of the placebo effect in a drug trial as junk data. We toss it out, yes? We are only interested in the drug effect, so we design the double-blind trial, no one knows what is the pharmaceutical and what is the sugar pill. The patients who get rid of the cancer or whatever with the sugar pill, we don’t worry about them. They are of no interest. And when someone is sick, or in pain, and we cannot find an organic, a material cause, we dismiss it. It is only psychosomatic, we say. And the mental diseases (90-91)...

Those mental diseases and that placebo effect, those are pieces of your Waltenschauung. Waltenschauung is the same as the idea of your central image that I have explored here before (link), the little painting in your mind that encapsulates in mood, symbol, space, color, and possibilities of the entire world which you rarely, if ever, do anything to other than animate. You develop that image very young, before, probably, the age of 5, and after that, you may shift a hip, a leg; you may paint a wall, enlarge a window slightly, but the whole of the image itself remains basically the same, unless you focus very, very hard and exert a strenuous conscious effort. Unless you change the world, actually. The day you put out your palm and stop a bullet, or pass through a wall, that’s the day you’ve stopped animating your childhood drawing and started taking an active role in your own existence. [As William James pointed out, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”] We have many mythologies in which characters do such wondrous deeds, but we understand them to be myths, and we understand myths to be lies, untruths; or we understand the actor to be one of a kind, and we just have to wait for his return.

Somehow, the existence of evil is much easier for us to grasp and believe. Is that the understanding of a small child, too small to think he/she can manage big monsters, too overwhelmed by that impatient lack of understanding when things don’t go his/her way? Is that why we grow up and believe in the impossible advances in weaponry, in the insane power of psychotics worldwide, in the oppressive “Reality” of the job market, of corporate control, of criminal activities--but not in equal measures of “good witch” powers?

In The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner describes the way the Expressionist style worked to bring inanimate objects to life; motion and emotion was inherent in the style. She describes objects of the Caligari set vibrating “with an extraordinary spirituality:”

The Germans, used as they are to savage legends, have an eerie gift for animating objects. In the normal syntax of the German language objects have a complete active life: they are spoken of with the same adjectives and verbs used to speak of human beings, they are endowed with the same qualities as people, they act and react in the same way. Long before Expressionism this anthropomorphism had already been pushed to the extreme....On the one hand the poet becomes a ‘field fissured with thirst’; on the other hand, the ‘voracious’ mouths of windows or the ‘avid’ darts of shadow pierce ‘shivering’ walls, while the ‘cruel’ leaves of ‘implacable’ doors slash the ‘moaning’ flanks of ‘despairing’ houses.

Language and mythical history both create and reflect the Weltanschauung of the German people and that particular world-view (latent image ); one aspect of it is that of objects being infused with life. When you study a dream, the building or room or mountain or woods that you are in all reflect the aspect of your person and your life (and your latent image) the dream is dealing with. Is the house old, new, well-built, shabby? What are the predominant colors? Are you in the basement (the foundation of the house); is it dark, scary, gloomy, or finished and well-lit? Are you suddenly discovering a rash of opulent extra rooms you never knew existed in your home? Are you on a balcony with a dizzyingly gorgeous view? Is there a sense of unease and danger in the woods that you are picking your way through? These settings are as important as the action in a dream; they are not background. So, too, in your “waking” life, and this is something that Expressionist artists paid close attention to. These ideas return and return again--now they are here in the modern physics, as scientists tell us that we are all, us and our surroundings, gazillions of jittering atoms in a constant exchange. I sit at this table writing, and the atoms in my body are exchanging with the atoms of the table. The history of the wood it was made from thus becomes a part of my (genetic, bacterial) history, and vice versa. Everything is living. Pantheism---everything is imbued with spirit.

Describing the Prague ghetto of the set of Golem, Eisner says:

In some mysterious way these streets contrive to abjure their life and feelings during the daytime, and lend them instead to their inhabitants, those enigmatic creatures who wander aimlessly around, feebly animated by an invisible magnetic current. But at night the houses reclaim their life with interest from these unreal inhabitants; they stiffen, and their sly faces fill with malevolence. The doors become gaping maws and shrieking gullets (23).

During the day, you are enacting the same mood that filled your dreams. This is because both moods are based on the same understanding of the universe. It is as if you dream one thing during the day (are you feebly animated?) and then get to see it in a slightly different setting at night. This gives you two opportunities to recognize what is working for you and what is not.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but shrieking gullets is not the way I want to see the doorways I walk through. That particular perception of the world does not excite me much. Yet watching the nightly news can easily make such rose-colored lenses your most-worn pair. Nuclear weapons, sadistic leaders, oppressive regimes, growing poverty. Going to work every day, for many, can be much like stepping on a moving belt that topples you right through the fiery jaws of the monstrous spirit of the Metropolis factory. The surroundings seem dim, and they overpower one. And we comfort ourselves, saying, everything is necessary, darkness and light.

But. What I want to argue here is, that is an imbalance of darkness. That is a feeble light, and an immense dark. That is not yin and yang, making a harmonious circle. It isn’t.

Darkness is the unknown, the woods at night, the steps downward into the cellar. Walking into them is you facing that unknown, you exploring territory you are unfamiliar with. That is difficult; it is a fear you overcome. Darkness is the mystery of life. It is what you enter instead of turning on the television and accepting whatever prefabricated dreams already exist in your world. The way we have defined darkness is unhealthy. It is unacceptable. Think back to the post on the Vodoun loa Erzulie, to the general acceptance, beautifully worded by Maya Deren, that her expectations of endless luxury and love and attention are that of a child--understandable only because a child knows no better. But it isn’t true. A child knows better. Erzulie requires that we take the time to make ourselves beautiful, to make our offerings beautiful, to remember that each motion and act is an art, more of an art than the finished product, and that it matters to take the time to make something gorgeous. And once we have done that, the rules we broke to make it no longer have blanket authority. We can weaken them by the edges, and work our way in.

.
Colette Colascione’s lush remake of Max Ernst’s collage from Une Semaine du Bonte

Back in The Serpent and the Rainbow, Davis describes how the setting of Haiti had such a different mood that it altered his own. His mindset, coming into the task he’d been sent for, was freshly altered from previous events, when he had quite suddenly decided he was bored with his usual anthropological studies and, having pointed to some strange location on a map and wildly thrown himself at its correlating physical location on the planet, he found himself waist-deep in flood waters, crossing unmapped territory and studying plants he knew nothing about with total strangers. This was a man willing to go down the cellar steps at midnight. In the following passage, he describes his hotel:

“The hotel appeared to have shifted its mood yet again. In the daylight when I had arrived it was a white palace, fragile and pretty, a gingerbread fantasy of turrets and towers, cupolas and wooden minarets decorated in lace, which paint alone kept from collapsing into the sea. By late afternoon it had fallen into desuetude, its beams swollen by the moist heat, its atmosphere dense from the impending storm. Later, in the wake of the deluge that tumbled every day like an avalanche onto the tropical plain of the city, the building’s facade washed clean, it glowed again with warmth and beauty in the soft air of dusk. Now, by night and a shrouded moon, it had grown morbid, abandoned, overgrown, staring out over the city with shuttered windows, its gates bound by lianas, its gardens unkempt and wild.”

So, he is becoming more and more aware of how his mood (as well as his beliefs) can affect his physical surroundings. Then an unknown gentleman approaches him:

“‘And you, mon cher, what are you here for?’ The words startled me, and I turned to face a narrow man dressed in fine linen, perched on the edge of the hotel veranda like a shorebird. In his right hand spun an ebony cane inlaid with silver.

‘A journalist, no doubt. And which of the many faces of this land shall you see? Shall you see the misery, the suffering, and call it the truth?’ (45)” [Note: this mysterious character reminds me of the loa Ghede, who has the particular talent of being able to see more than one world at a time]

Think of that! The misery and the suffering: is that not what we call the truth? Do we not call it the news, reality? Do we not exhort others to “face reality?” Like the bumper sticker says, If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention? Let’s revisit Erzulie for a moment. Let’s realign our expectations with something closer to what we would like to expect. How will we dream a world which is amazing, if our perceptual screen, if our Weltanschauung does not make space for the amazing?

PART TWO:

“Your knee is not working smoothly. We must give you some clay to make a statue of a running woman,” Hippocrates diagnosed.

Now, remember the Remedios Varo quote at the top of this blog? That is how we will escape.

Back in The Serpent and the Rainbow, Mr. Davis remembers a visit to the Andes in which he saw something similar to that quote in a curandero’s treatmant of a man ill to his core:

My tired thoughts broke into fragments that landed on a distant night, cold and clear as glass, in the high Andes of Peru. A brown dusty trail curved past agave swollen in bud and rose to an open veranda flanked on three sides by the adobe walls of the farmhouse. Against one wall sat the patient, alone and strangely solemn. He had been a prosperous fisherman a season ago, before the currents shifted and the warm tropical waters came south to strangle the sea life of the entire coast. As if conforming to some bitter law of physics, his personal life had mimicked the natural disorder [italics mine]: his child had taken ill, and then his wife fled with a lover. In the wake of these events the poor man disappeared from his village, only to reappear a month later, a simulacrum of death, naked and quite insane.For two weeks the curandero had sought in vain to divine the source of such misfortune. With his inherent eye for the sacred he had laid out the power objects of his altar--stone crystals, jaguag teeth, murex shells, whale bones, and ancient huacas that rose methodically to touch an arc of colonial swords impaling the earth. In nocturnal ceremonies he and the patient had together inhaled a decoction of alcohol and tobacco from scallop shells carefully balanced beneath each nostril...(p. 35)

Here we are, remembering that the objects around us are infused with our being (and we with theirs) and full of meaning and power. Their placement is part of our latent image, and it is part of where we are now. Usually, we sit and stand and move around only in that image, only acting under its underlying rules. Now, if we move objects in a way that makes no sense, if we connect things that don’t belong together and alter things that we have never before thought to alter, we change our environment and open up room for something that doesn’t belong to it to exist. We shift the underlying rules; we shift the actual latent image. So, like Varo, we move these things together, and then we draw some connection (however arbitrary or silly it may feel) between that motion and some other event that occurs afterwards, and then we create a meaning for it. We note and understand that we have created a change, that we have practiced magic. And once we have understood that, well--we have broken many underlying rules, haven’t we? And opened many new doors. And all of a sudden, we are breaking down walls and our architecture has swung wildly from Gothic Cathedrals to Frank Gehry swooping, curving windows. All of a sudden, the bomb that’s been whistling towards us drops to the ground with a plink, nothing more than a minor explosion of dust.

Artnap V: Noir

2011-12-02T07:43:00.001-08:00

Acrylic on panel.
“Amnesia is noir’s version of the common cold.”—Lee Server
This is part of a series of illustrations to go with a story of detection the lovely and talented Vesna is writing (you can see previous hints here ). In the story, the femme (a painter) has an internal conflict: she wants something, but she subconsciously subverts herself, which I think is a pretty common problem for people… In her case, there is a little issue of “forgetting,” which is the tool her subconscious uses. In that, the dark, labyrinthine qualities of the american noir cityscapes match the anfractuosity of the human brain, where what we want and what we think we want get twisted and confused and the bad “map” that creates for us runs us into walls and off of cliffs.
But not here. Here, for reasons that will become clear later, the artistic force of the painter/dreamer and the special vision of the detective will overcome the twisty darkness of the landscape in a way that the fatalism of classic noir film characters could not. The success has to do with seeing beyond (more than) what’s “there”; with the particular song of your heart and your willingness and ability to hear it and express it; and with a little bit of magic craziness (that’s the cat). Who is catching whom? I don’t know. But together, they will pull the light from behind the curtain….

ALSO
For those of you who are even mildly interested in the cafe mentioned in the last post, the rules are slackening slightly. You would have 50 pages, give or take, and it doesn't have to be from one long work. As long as it's cohesive, it can be a collection of works.
Also, each round will be only one week, only one exchange. If you have any other suggestions, I'm game!

AND
there's an excellent writer's game we've tried on Continuum-Art (link to the side) before that was fun, and it has been picking up steam on the red bubble site. Throughout the day, you add five words to the story. What's already there (109 pages!) is pretty hysterical, though it sort of lacks a plot :D
Here it is.
I recommend joining in.
That's it!

Call For Writers...

2011-11-29T07:11:00.001-08:00

Vesna and I are trying an experiment.We are opening a group on the site RedBubble (you join that site just like you join any other, with a name and a password. There is no extra commitment there, but it has a "group" facility.) The group is called Cafe Le Chat Bleu. This little cafe is the beginning of an idea based on the French cabaret Le Chat Noir, which you can read about here. The experiment has two parts; one is a pretty big commitment, but only for a short period of time, whereas the other is quick and fun.

PART ONE:This group will be “open” only on a rotating basis. Each rotation will be 3 weeks long. To join, you submit 50 pages of a body of work and commit to actively reading (meaning with notes, suggestions,questions, useful comments) 10 pages per day of someone else’s work for five days, two days off, then 10 pages per day of a second person’s work, then two days off, then a third round.This arrangement does two things: each person gets three committed readers to their 50 pages, and also two days in between readers to make adjustments based on the previous reading. There is no group activity except during these rotations; whenever there are 9 participants, there will be a three-week round.

PART TWO:We would like to try an experiment, if anyone is interested. This activity would begeneral admission: on Saturdays and/or Sundays, at a specific time, there could be a group skype open mic. On the one day, it would be poetry readings, on the other day, it would be comic monologues. You do not have to have 50 pages of any kind of material for this!I will post a sign-up sheet. When there are 9 (why not?) interested parties, the date will be set! Again, to participate, you do not have to be a member of this group.
I am curious how this part will change interactions over the internet :)

Now Showing: Clive Hicks-Jenkins and the Miraculous

2011-11-23T12:28:00.001-08:00

“The Rapture,” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
The story of the Archangel Raphael includes many adventures and extends to the sounding of the trumpet at the end of times and the beginnings of the day of Final Judgment. He is the Angel of Healing Waters, blowing along their surface to remove whatever suffering is within them. He is also the companion of Tobias, a young man betrothed to a woman so cursed her seven previous engagements ended in the death of the fiancé on the night of the wedding. He instructs Tobias to catch a fish from those waters over which he holds such sway, and he burns the heart and liver to drive away the demon that defeats her so, then uses the gallbladder to heal his father’s blindness.
This is an angel that sees all; you can see that much from the expression on his face. He sees the beginnings of our world in the chaos of the waters and the ends of them are carried in his breath, part of which is always held in waiting for God’s command to blow the final trumpet. In Clive’s above portrayal of Raphael, you can see the foliage embroidered on his jacket; the wings hold the waters of the earth and the waters of chaos, the feathers of birds, and the constellations of the night sky. He carries the universe and all its stories and maps—imagined, fantasized, and followed--on his back.
And from all that, he can give to us the gift of a second sight of sorts, and here he does. We are presented with a dizzying aerial view, a very full view of the earth. To Tobias, who is turned away from us, he gives some other, secret knowledge not imparted to us. And yet another view is present: the dog’s. Clive’s Jack, carried along in the fray, sees *us*.

The above painting was the result of a collaboration with the poet Damien Walford Davis.
The Rapture

Earlier that day,
sensing somethingarchangelic in the air, they cordoned off.

the cool piazza, locked the domed
basilica, closed the crossing.

to the island charnel house and church.
When the quattrocento stage was set,.

they sent the scapegoat out, the lure –
fishing-rod in hand, patched terrier.

to heel – and drew the blackout curtains
close. When he walked in later,.

brilliant as the fish he held, they gathered
round to touch his suit and sun-bleached.

hair: So did it speak? they asked, afraid;
What colour were its wings? And did it.

burn? No words, he said, or fire;
but from that height I saw beyond.

the valley to an exit road where drones
then jetplanes strafed a speeding column.

black, and men crept into holes, their
pounded flesh the many colours of his wings..

Damian Walford Davis 2011

“Nest” by Clive Hicks-JenkinsI have written about Clive’s portrayals of St. Kevin and the Blackbird and St. Herve and the wolf before [here] http://zoe-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/2009/10/creatures-of-earth-art-of-clive-hicks.html, but for his new show at the Martin Tinney Gallery in Wales beginning November 24, 2011, the evolution of his portrayal of these saints has been amazing, unfolding their stories in new directions and reigniting the potency of their meaning in our lives.This new collection of works seems to emphasize the idea of the entire world being present in the form of a Guardian, in this case a saint. In the story of St. Kevin, a bird comes to rest in his outstretched hand and stays to build its nest and lay its eggs and raise its young to first flight. The saint carries the life and safety of the forest in himself for the bird, and that incarnates as foliage on his flesh. After studying these works, you could enter the forest and see the larger shape of St. Kevin embracing you; as you peer up at the night sky, you could see, outside the smaller forms of the tales of Gemini, Cygnus, and Ursa Major, outside the patterns we use to map out our histories and our futures, the overarching story of Raphael and his healing waters. His wings alone carry all our stories of suffering and its defeat; they are larger than any of those stories—larger than all of them, even. He is himself giant and Romanesque, and the weight of all he carries and all he sees is present on his face. And it is therefore not ours to carry. That’s important. And it is the purpose, isn’t it, of those stories?

“Held,” by Clive Hicks-JenkinsThis all-encompassing form is even more interesting when we think of the boxed-in sensation of the story of St. Kevin: he is trapped, in one spot, for the entire building of the nest, the gestation of the egg, and the birth and total dependence of the chick until it is able to leave on its own. The shape of Clive’s drawings underlines that sensation: St. Kevin barely fits the frame, his muscular torso contorts painfully. Yet he becomes the tree, the foliage sprouting across his chest, an impossible patience taking root within him—he creates the world the bird needs; he becomes it.Of tattoos, Clive notes: “…the irreversible is always alarming. But then life is irreversible, and that’s what makes it poignant, exciting, tragic…indeed just about anything you care to call it.” And in fact, the bird has already flown off in these new images, underlining the permanent, irreversible aspect of his decision: he is still rooted to the spot, growing into the landscape that chose him.

“Tobias and the Angel,” by Clive Hicks-JenkinsClive writes: “The large chiaroscuro study of Tobias and the Angel (the detail above repays clicking on to see a magnified version) is progressing in rather unexpected ways. I’ve been exploring tone and texture to conjure angelic wings and garments that are a step onward from what I’ve attempted in the past. Something happened with the mark-making, transforming what I’d intended to be a tweed-textured jacket into a weave far stranger, almost suggesting a matador’s glittering ‘suit of lights’ oddly combined with the spotted markings of a big cat. This wasn’t at all the direction I’d planned, but now I’m hooked.”These marks then developed further, through a hearty back-and-forth with the readers of his artlog (a lively and energetically collaborative space in itself), to show constellations, smoke, plumage, and water. All this would later have to be translated to the color “version:”“Just the base colours of phthalocyanine blue and cobalt turquoise being worked in at the moment, after which I’ll start laying in the patterning. It’s a long job as the markings suggest turbulent waves, flow patterns, constellations and overlapping pinions, so there’s nothing for it but to keep my concentration fixed and to work work work…”[then] “Back to wings again today, and the task of suggesting colour, iridescence and texture. Water-flow, pinions, ruffles, scales and constellations of stars are a few of the ideas worked into these. Paint has been brushed, smeared, sanded back and scratched through with engraving needles. It’s a slow process but I’m getting there.”Though many of the works for this show are done in black conte over white Arches paper, the acrylic works that he has created show an amazing development of color. A palette already phenomenal—truly, the first thing to draw me into his works in the beginning—has become miraculous. The glowing honey color of Raphael’s jacket, the astonishing shimmer he has created in the wings, and the blues of St. Herve’s face are the openings to a new world in themselves. See the peace in Herve’s face tucked up trustingly against the wild snarl of the wolf. See again, that eye: the central eye of the piece, the wild wolf that sees you watching him, and is not moved.

“Hold,” by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Artnap IV: Selenomancy or Selenography

2011-11-14T06:53:00.001-08:00

Acrylic on Panel

24in x 18in

Selenography: Moon mapping. Selenomancy: Divination through study of thepatterns and motions of the moon. See Ars Memoria for an exploration of theidea of recording (memory) and imagining (mapping the future) as two sides ofthe same coin…

In Embracing the Wide Sky, Daniel Tammet writes,

“As a child, Ilearned and remembered many things using my imagination. Role-playing is a veryeffective way to encode new information, because it requires careful thoughtthat derives from self-reflection: ‘How do I do this?’ and ‘How would others dothis?” are useful questions to ask yourself when learning something new.”

Imagination andmemory are always intertwined. By using this method, you are also saying: ‘ifmy life were this way/if I were this person, then x would affect me in thatway.’ ‘If I had grown up this way, and become this person, I would behave thisway in this situation.’ You act it out. And if you use that persona regularlyin your memory-making and actions, then you effectively re-code your personalstory, your personal memory, and become that person, thus also effectivelychanging your future. This is “magic:” you’ve changed the future by changingthe past. This is the practice of Ars Memoria.

In Artnap, thestory, the woman has an inner conflict that disturbs her sleep and interferes withher waking life, as well. Here, by the light of the moon, her dreaming mindgrapples with the problem, drawing together images and associations until itcreates a possible solution, in the form of the detective (who has been hiredin the waking world), giving him his tools and his doorway (the time-spaceclock which dissolves into a ‘tunnel’ between worlds) and his task.

In Selenography/ Selenomancy (Part of the ArtnapSeries), she is ‘mapping’ the moon by drawing forms its craters and texturedsurface appear similar to—much like people “learned” the interrelations of thestars for directional purposes in the past by connecting the lines to formfigures from their mythology, by giving the stars patterns and meanings alreadyfamiliar to them. This is a form of memory, but also, there is someinexplicable synchronicity in her way of seeing at this moment and the worldaround her. Is she foreseeing his approach? Or is she drawing him to her?

Little Blue Ship

2011-10-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sooo...
This still isn't the final site, but it's completely revamped anyway. That's what happens when I try to 'edit.'
It's linked to the top right, if the link in the blog ends up not working.

Little Blue Ship

The Night Circus

2011-10-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.

The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding ﬁelds. Black- and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.

The book opens thus, with the unannounced arrival of the circus. You enter the world as an astonished outsider, as part of the crowd anticipating its new role as audience, but you leave the story in quite a different way, more aware, more alive, a part of the circus: knowing that you have a role in keeping it alive.

This circus is open only at night.

ʻWhat kind of circus is only open at night?ʼ people ask. No one has a proper answer, yet as dusk approaches there is a substantial crowd of spectators gathering outside the gates.

You are amongst them, of course. Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiosity is wont to do.

It is Le Cirque des Reves, the Dream Circus, the Circus of Dreams.

Part of the story is an argument between two men about whether magic has to come naturally to someone, or whether it is a talent that can be taught. I will say only that this argument is made in the way arguments usually are, with a careless bluntness and disregard for “collateral damage.” The magic of the tale is in the fact that magic is something that can shred both sides of an argument and heal those wounded by the arguers; it is in the fact that magic is both a natural talent and something you, and I, can, through focus, learn to wield ourselves. We do it every day.

I have written often on this site about perspective, about how our beliefs shape what we see and block other things from our view. There have been mountains of experiments to explain this phenomenon that makes it impossible to rely on witness testimony, difficult to rely on our own memory, and uncertain about what we can truly claim to be reality. But what none of these experiments seem to focus on (please correct me if you know otherwise) is the best part: you donʼt have to live in a wretched world where the nightly news gives you heartburn and your interactions with others are tinged with distrust and fear. After all, you’re actively creating that world as you go along.

Tonight, the circus could arrive. You might notice people performing who are doing something you previously thought impossible. You might make some sort of decision in your own life based on that moment of surprise. You might feel that you are entering a dream,

and

You might, lucidly, decide to alter your surroundings, and your relationship with them.

In a dream, the monster chases you, and you are never fast enough. You turn and scream, “why?” as he rips you to shreds, and somewhere in the middle, you wake up, sweating and exhausted, and later you return to the same dream. This repetition means something. The meaning is not: Just like when Iʼm awake, when Iʼm dreaming, things go to hell. The dream is simply a short story encapsulating your beliefs. Once you know youʼre dreaming, without waking up, you decide that you would prefer a different relationship with this monster, you turn around, you invite it for tea. The next morning you wake up and go about your business, and that night, the circus arrives.

Seriously.

The next step, the step that takes focus, is realizing that you are always dreaming. Alter your surroundings slightly and change your relationship with them. The whole world will change accordingly. There are many world beliefs based on this. At the top of the blog, we have the famous quote from Remedios Varo about the placement of a pot of green paint and a pattern for making vests. There is Feng Shui, the art of arranging the items in your house in order to invite certain energies in. We have the placement of candles and images of saints, paired with patterns of word and rhythm, to request the intercession of particular powers in our affairs. We have habit.
Habit grinds certain neuro-chemical pathways into the folds of your brain; it creates patterns. Those patterns inhabit your motions; they inhabit your emotions; they control not just how you interpret what you see, but what you see. Ritual is an attempt at reversal of a particular harmful pattern. Ritual is a magical inﬂuence on the world around you. It has tangible effects.

ʻCelia,ʼ” he says without looking up at her, ʻwhy do we wind our watch?ʼ
ʻBecause everything requires energy,ʼ she recites obediently, eyes still focused on her hand. ʻWe must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.ʼ

I would posit that the seeming lack of magic in the world is simply a matter of laziness.

An unwillingness to focus, to put that effort and energy into what we wish to change. Not necessarily a particularly negative form of laziness; often it’s only a lack of clear desires and goals. In many of the scientific experiments designed to test for the existence of ESP, the person tested looks at playing card after playing card, trying to guess the next one. Scientists have noted that performance decreases over time. There is a theory being posited, which makes sense to me, that these clean lab-tests, while the only method acceptable for “proving” the existence of something to a doubting public, are also the worst way to test for that existence: the knowledge sought is not anything the person being tested actually cares about. Who can focus in such a situation? What’s the next card? What difference does it make? Even if you’re “trying,” the core of your focus just can’t put itself in such an unimportant place. What goes through your head as you sit through one of those tests? Probably “what’s for dinner?” Borges once stated that the problem with scientific tests is that nothing in life occurs like a lab experiment; there are endless interactions in reality, all of which alter the impact of a particular (interactive) part. In this case, removing all subjective importance in the testing process also removes the impetus for focus, which removes the likelihood of any extra-sensory perception taking place. We’ve all heard stories of super-human strength in a person at the time of an emergency—mothers who can lift cars off of their children, that sort of thing. Lifting the car for the hell of it is another item entirely, and hugely unlikely.

As Kafka says in the quote above, “The nonexistent is that which we have not sufficiently desired.”

This story, The Night Circus, is almost a how-to. It is not just full of beautiful language, intense imagery,
and a spellbinding tale. It leads you from spectator to performer; it reminds you of your own abilities.

The reader gets brief descriptions of the circus from Friedrick Thiessen, a writer that is so enthralled with the circus that his writings about it in the papers gather a following whose members come to be called “Reveurs;” dreamers. They enter the black and white circus also dressed in black and white, with one scarlet addition, so as to not presume themselves on the same level as the performers. They follow the circus; they bring it deep into their own lives, and in their day long before overnight deliveries and well, well, before the internet, they forge lasting relationships across the world.
A few chapters in, you are drawn forward, from outsider to spectator:

Beyond the ticket booth the only way forward is through a heavy striped curtain. One by one each person passes through it, vanishing from sight.When it is your turn, you pull back the fabric and step forward, only to be engulfed by darkness as the curtain closes again.

After the above quote, in which you, from the audience, enter the circus, your eyes are closed by the darkness and given time to slowly adjust to some other way of seeing (which becomes stars lining a twisted hallway, through which you feel your way until you are set back out in the light, which is now blinding in its seeming intensity...), a new chapter opens in which we meet Bailey. Bailey is a young boy who discovers the circus as we do, with its unannounced arrival in his town. He goes; he is enthralled. But during the day, his irritating older sister dares him to enter the gates during the day.

He takes the dare.

And even though it seems that nothing much happens, something is begun. He goes back to his home, back to the regular family problems and overwhelming decisions of coming into adulthood, but something has changed. He has begun a process. It takes him a while. It takes him as long as it takes us, in fact; it takes him the length of the story. Iʼll come back to him.

We receive our pieces of the story from three sources: we watch the magicians Celia and Marco grow
into adulthood and begin their work in the circus, their story driving the stories of everyone else in the book--the whole world, in fact. We read the descriptions of Thiessen and join his fellow Reveurs in their astonishment which draws them inside to be more than mere spectators, though not exactly performers. And we watch Bailey grow from his position outside the gates, like us, move inside the gates, and become a force from within the Circus of Dreams itself. The book is magic, its story enthralling; the book is a guide.

PART TWO: ILLUMINATION

There is so much that glows in the circus, from ﬂames to lanterns to stars. I have
heard the expression ʻtrick of the lightʼ applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so
frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion
of illumination. --Friedrick Thiessen, 1894

A complex illusion of illumination. Like a holograph, creating a three-dimensional world out of light and air: this is what our brain does, by the way--it formulates some visual representation of a series of informational signals, and it convinces the rest of our senses of the details of that representation. If you donʼt like the style of your holograph- maker, create a new model. Put the spotlight on different parts of the stage, close your
eyes and inhale the scent of something else, focus your mind until you can feel a particular material, a ﬂower petal, the skin of another, the texture of warm beach sand. Maybe youʼll open your eyes on the same ofﬁce you closed your eyes in, but something will have changed. Underneath. Baileyʼs story is there to show us how.

On this evening, Mme. Padva wears a dress of black silk, hand embroidered with
intricate patterns of cherry blossoms, something like a kimono reincarnated as a gown.
Her silver hair is piled atop her head and held in place with a small jeweled black cage.
A choker of perfectly cut scarlet rubies circles her neck, putting forth a vague impression
of her throat having been slit. The overall effect is slightly morbid and incredibly elegant.

Mr. Ethan W. Barris is an engineer and architect of some renown, and the second of the
guests to arrive. He looks as though he has wandered into the wrong building and
would be more at home in an ofﬁce or a bank with his timid manner and silver
spectacles, his hair carefully combed to disguise the fact that it is beginning to thin...

Do not think you must be born a magician, like Celia, or tutored from childhood, like Marco. Do not even think you must be a regal and aging theater personality, like Mademoiselle Padva. You, the anxious one from the back of the class, the one who wanders through life, shufﬂed from one position to another by “higher forces,” the one who doesnʼt see how you can have any impact on your own existence--or at least no more than it takes to keep your head barely above water--this is the call youʼve been waiting for. Get up. Focus on the thing that matters, but focus on it internally. I think the confusion about magic is, weʼre all trying to bend the spoon in front of us. As the small, wise child in the Matrix says, there is no spoon. You choose something fantastic, something that exists only in your own head. You focus on it, you develop it--

A small example, this is difﬁcult--

Say you want to build a clock. That is your mental project. Why a clock? Why not? It is an image, an object that resonates with you. You are drawn in by the perfection of its pieces, by its rhythm, by the regular glimmer of the swinging pendulum, by the grace of the woodwork and the futuristic (even after all this time) aspect of its works. Gears that all come together to make a small dance, perhaps even with a special show at the turning of the hour, a small door opening, someone coming out for a dance or a song. Itʼs magical enough as it is. And it marks something so oddly unreal and yet so enormously controlling. Focus. You are creating something. Whatever you create matters. Where your focus is matters.

A man from the circus approaches Herr Thiessen the clockmaker asking him to create das Meisterwerk.
Money is no object. The only constraints are that it must be only in shades of grey from black to white, and that it must be Dreamlike. Her Thiessen, it must be emphasized, is a clock-maker. Not a magician. Not even, thus far, afﬁliated with a circus.
Herr Thiessen, loving details and loving challenge, puts his all into the project.

The ﬁnished clock is resplendent. At ﬁrst glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black
clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately
carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock.
But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily
and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else.
The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and
then there are clouds that ﬂoat across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite
side.

Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As
though the clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.
All of this takes hours.

The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where
the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically
turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey.

And it is not just pieces, it is ﬁgures and objects, perfectly carved ﬂowers and planets
and tiny books with actual paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon that curls
around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in
distress, awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that pour into teacups and miniscule curls
of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats
chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played.

At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the
juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that
correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at
midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern.

After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and
the clouds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself
vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.

Sounds impossible? Here for your amazement is an actual clock, designed by Abū al-'Iz Ibn Ismā'īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī in the 1200s:

[The intricate action is described thus on wikipedia:

"The timing mechanism is based on a water-filled bucket hidden inside the elephant. In the bucket is a deep bowl floating in the water, but with a small hole in the centre. The bowl takes half an hour to fill through this hole. In the process of sinking, the bowl pulls a string attached to a see-saw mechanism in the tower on top of the elephant. This releases a ball that drops into the mouth of a Serpent, causing the serpent to tip forward, which pulls the sunken bowl out of the water via strings. At the same time, a system of strings causes a figure in the tower to raise either the left or right hand and the mahout (elephant driver at the front) to hit a drum. This indicates a half or full hour. Next the snake tips back. The cycle then repeats, as long as balls remain in the upper reservoir to power the emptying of the bowl...Another innovative feature of the clock was how it recorded the passage of temporal hours, which meant that the rate of flow had to be changed daily to match the uneven length of days throughout the year."]

No detail is too unimportant to receive your attention. You are sitting at your desk, which is a mess—a mess of items you have to deal with, which you would like to put off. Arrange it: put something to the right which represents things you would like drawn to you. Put something to the left which represents moments in which you have felt strongest and most able. Put something in the drawer that smells good, and smell it often. Put an unﬁnished piece of something which matters to you there also, and during idle moments or irritating moments, let your gaze ﬂoat over to it, let your mind wonder how you might work on it next.

Bailey does something like this. He works on the family farm, and it is not his dream job. He spends a lot of time in the tree he has loved climbing since he was a child, the same tree he was sitting in (though on a branch below his sister) when she dared him to enter the circus after hours, often wishing he was a princess some knight would come and spirit away, even grumbling to himself about the absolute unfairness of the fact that all fairy tales only give such an opportunity to girls.

He tells himself that it is not a bad life. That there is nothing wrong with being a farmer.
But still, the discontent remains. Even the ground beneath his feet feels unsatisfying to his boots.
So he continues to escape to his tree.

To make the tree his own, he even goes so far as to move the old wooden box in which he keeps his most valued possessions from its standard hiding spot beneath a loose floorboard under his bed to a nook in the oak tree, a substantial indentation that is not quite a hole but secure enough to serve the purpose.

The box is fairly small, with tarnished brass hinges and clasps. It is wrapped in a scrap of burlap that does a fairly good job of keeping it protected from the elements, and it sits securely enough that it has not been dislodged by even the most resourceful squirrels.

Its contents include a chipped arrowhead he found in a field when he was five. A stone with a hole straight through it that is supposedly lucky. A black feather. A shiny rock that his mother said was some sort of quartz. A coin that was his first never-spent pocket money. The brown leather collar that belonged to the family dog who died when Bailey was nine. A solitary white glove that has gone rather grey from a combination of age and being kept in a small box with rocks [note: this glove was given to him when he snuck into the circus].

And several yellowed and folded pages filled with handwritten text.

After the circus departed, he wrote down every detail he could remember about it so it would not fade in his memory. The chocolate-covered popcorn. The tent full of people on raised circular platforms, performing tricks with bright white fire. The magical, transforming clock that sat across from the ticket booth, doing so much more than simply telling the time.

While he catalogued each element of the circus in shaky handwriting, he could not manage to record his encounter with the red-haired girl. He never told anyone about her. He looked for her at the circus during his two subsequent visits during proper nighttime hours, but he had not been able to find her.

Then the circus was gone, vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, like a fleeting dream.

First of all, there is an action. He feels unsatisfied with the ground, so he climbs above it. He wants to leave the house he lives in—this is as specific as his desire gets—and so he moves his box of treasures from underneath the bed (the safe, the most inside room of the house, really), to the top of the tree, which stretches towards the sky. Up and out—that’s a good start, at least. Another action is the writing he does. He records every detail. Why? So he can call it up again. He can recreate the circus in his mind; he can smell it, see it; there are visual symbols to take him back, and there is the glove—a tactile proof of some other world, some other place, some other possibility. Also, there is a secret. All magic has a secret. The secret is his meeting with the girl.

’Secrets have power,’ Widget begins. ‘And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it…

This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit…’

But there’s another way that could go: a secret gets passed to you, and you make it your own. You learn a technique, add your secret sauce, and voila: new magic.

Clock by Eric Freitas

(“Growing relentlessly in the mind of Eric Freitas lies a realm of dark mechanical curiosities and horological contradictions. In this world gears are harvested and mechanisms are alive with the organic repetitions of nature's machine. Balancing carefully between creative conception and logical execution, this world would slowly be brought to life. In 2004 Eric began to study the dying craft of clockmaking so that his ideas could be executed, and it would become apparent that even an instrument as logical and precise as a clock could be compromised by ungoverned subconscious thought.”—from his website)

There is much that goes on in this novel, and I haven’t even touched on the masterfully written story of a great love between two magicians, Celia and Marco. I have not described a single tent in the immense maze of mysterious circus tents, a single flavor of the amazing dinner-parties thrown by the circus proprietor. Or the way that Bailey comes in to his own. Read this book.

Note: The magnificence of clockworks extended into the creation of automata that did not “bother” with marking time. Tiny humans played chess; music boxes opened to reveal dancers inside. The wondrous possibilities of gears extended to the stage and expanded in scope via magicians. Below is one of the more famous magic pieces performed by Robert Houdin, who was a pioneer of such automata use. (The Night Circus does not go in this direction, but the story of the circus clock leads me there in my own twisted mind .) It was called “The Marvelous Orange Tree" and in the movie “The Illusionist,” Edward Norton performs a variation of it. If you can get through the theatrics of the first 2 or 3 minutes, you will reach the performance of the orange tree, which is truly amazing. I don’t want to know how it works… After all, does it matter? He paid attention to the details, and he created magic.

Enjoy!

The Artnap Project

2011-10-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves,  And the mome raths outgrabe.
--Jabberwocky

So, although my father often wanders around the house reciting bits of the Jabberwocky, and although I’m mildly obsessed with other works of Lewis Carroll, this opening gambit pretty much shut my brain down, and I never really took to the Jabberwocky as anything more than the fantastic sound it makes when bellowed aloud. Then I came across this word in The Daily Figaro: Portmanteau.
“Originally, a portmanteau carried a nobleman’s luggage. Later the word referred to a bag slung onto a horse, which evolved into a suitcase that opens like a book. Then Lewis Carroll analogized it. In Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty explains that slithy combines lithe and slimy, mimsy hybridizes miserable and flimsy, and so on. ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.””

Carroll explained it a bit more in his own introduction to The Hunting of the Snark:
“Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words "fuming" and "furious". Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first ... if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say "frumious".”

There are plenty of portmanteaus in everyday speech, like smog: a mix of smoke and fog. Or motel: motor and hotel. Or brunch: breakfast and lunch. Everyone remembers “Brangelina?”
A more interesting one is “flabbergast,” the history of which I found on http://www.word-detective.com/

“Dating to the 18th century and most likely a combination of "flabby" or "flap" and "aghast," the logic underlying "flabbergast," meaning "extremely frightened or surprised," is a bit obscure. My guess is that "flabbergast" was originally intended to conjure up visions of someone so terrified or astonished that they trembled like a bowl of Jell-O. "Flabby," incidentally, is closely related to the old word "flappy" -- to say someone is flabby is to say that they "flap" when they move, which is enough to send anyone to the gym.”

Vesna and I have been on a vocabulary binge, lately, for a project I won’t go into here, and one of the products of it is the following portmanteau:
Artnapping: Art + nap (sleep) + nap (nab/ kidnap). The above black ink drawing was the first image to flesh out the ideas of the story (story to come). Then I decided to finally try my hand at maquettes, those moveable models that Clive Hicks-Jenkins uses in his studio that I love so much:

(Vesna's completed story will go here: SOON )

And finally, I worked my way towards this painting:

Capture By Tango

The clock is run by the sign of Pisces, and the juggler tells you the time by the number of glowing orbs he juggles (a concept taken from The Night Circus; more on that amazing book coming soon). If you click the link for the painting, you will see that there are two other female dancers disappearing and reappearing amongst the pillars. The detective has used his trusty phonograph (a weapon much more useful, I find, than the usual detective tool) to descend into the dream and capture the correct dreamer.

Grotesque

2011-09-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

“The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens,

And ink in unfailing supplies:

While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens,

And watched with wondering eyes.”

Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

Murder in the Court of the Katydid King

by Richard A. Kirk

(Discovered via Phantasmaphile)

Richard A. Kirk’s work will be shown (alongside the work of several other artists) in “Cute and Creepy,” at the Museum of Fine Arts of Florida State University, from October 13th to November 20th. All artwork in this post is his.

The show is described as a show of works combining the Pop Surreal style with an element of the grotesque, “a dissonance of simultaneous attraction and revulsion” (Samantha Levin).

Grotesque being a fascinating word, I will go into it a little further, here. It is a word that has been used to describe the writings of Kafka and O’Connor, and the paintings of Bosch, Goya, and Otto Dix. Nancy Hightower, who teaches Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder, says: “What I admire very much about the theory is that it has to play by certain ‘rules’--i.e. just because something is strange and weird, it’s not necessarily grotesque, not in the sense that I teach it. The grotesque is an operation, a form of persuasion that artists and writers use to create a paradigm shift in the viewer. And to me, this shift must always move in the direction of redemption, i.e. in making us a kinder, more loving world.”

Botanica

By Richard A. Kirk

Hightower’s concept of the grotesque appeals to me in several ways. I am always left cold by art that is merely gross and strange, or art that seems to do nothing but show the gory nature of our society and the painful places we have come to. Art that “mirrors” our daily violence instead of breaking a window or a door out into something better--a surprise, a new idea. A paradigm shift in the direction of redemption--that is something worth our focus.

I have heard this idea before, but never been fully convinced that terrifying aspects really add to the experience of a paradigm shift. Or, I’ve never been too inclined to be fully convinced of it. Her explanation of how the process applies in the works of the “Cute and Creepy” show, though, makes sense: she suggests that by having both humor and horror, both cute and creepy, in front of us, we are moved to a “liminal,” an in-between state, that is, a state where our most solid conceptual and perceptual theories become ungrounded, and a doorway we normally would have been blind to might be noticed. Even opened.

An example is Richard A. Kirk’s “INX”:
The title is a portmanteau, which he unpacks: “The artist and sphinx are combined in a form that suggests a question mark and therefore a riddle. The artist’s hands are brushes, suggesting that he has drawn himself into existence in an effort to find meaning and truth.”
There is a thought: we are all drawing ourselves into existence. An artist (not necessarily a visual artist, either) though, takes that task seriously. He/she is not just throwing together homework at the last minute or riding the treadmill of the punch-clock. Focus. Attention to questions, to riddles. Attempts at teasing them into worlds and possibilities. Kirk is an artist that has honed the fine art of focus: one square inch of an ink and silverpoint drawing will take him about an hour.
There are a lot of things that are scary (thus the creepy part) of not knowing exactly where you’re going. For example, where’s the artist’s next meal coming from? Kirk notes on his (link) webpage that those lured into mysterious other worlds often find trouble.

Promise of the Cuckoo

by Richard A. Kirk

In her essay in the catalogue for the exhibition, Hightower states, “Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that as a “construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals’ that which warns…like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself”. What sets up this kind of fulcrum is society itself: “The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster's body. A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration…”. These kinds of juxtapositions are what form the definition of the grotesque.”

Resistance to integration-- think about a monster in a dream. It is a patchwork of things you are anxious about and afraid of, and things you want to do and the inkling of danger that comes when you try to push forward in your life into something new. Because something new is something unknown, and we just heard Kirk’s warning, an echo of many childhood tales, about what can happen when you follow the strange creature into a mysterious world. That monster is necessary, it’s there to show us how all those things patch together, it’s there not allowing them to blend, so that you can see the distinct pieces, pull it apart, lose your fear, and move forward. Paradigm shift. In studying that monster, you realize why you’re treading water, why you seemingly aren’t able to do the things you think you want to do. Don’t flinch when he breathes fire. Just keep picking at his clothes. It’s only a dream.

In an interview with the creator of Phantasmaphile, Kirk states: “I am interested in liminal things; protean forms. The generation of ideas is both conscious and unconscious. I draw things that I enjoy looking at like birds, insects, trees and books. Over time, I have developed a kind of personal iconography. I try to develop work that tells a story, perhaps not the same story for everyone, but also leaves many questions unanswered. I love mystery in a work of art. Have you read Little, Big by John Crowley? The idea of worlds within worlds interests me very much, like the house Edgewood in the book; a house that inside is many houses.”

The Lost Machine

by Richard A. Kirk

For example, there is the above image. Here is a bird that is mechanical. Someone has to wind it Yet, something else is happening. It eats eggs? Its own young? Or is it caring for its young, carrying it to a safe place? And doesn’t either case make it also alive? Are we the same way, half-wound (by parents, by society, by some god or gods) and half full of our own intentions? Or is this an image that suggests that such a thing as creating our own young is a habit: wind up the human, push it through adolescence (hopefully), toss it out of the nest, and it produces an egg. Are we purely mechanical beings?
And--
inside this image is a novella. So, a story within a story--one with mechanical men, even. Or a series of questions within a series of questions. And it is some sort of mystery novella, to boot, which puts it right up my alley (to be reviewed soon?).

Vesna and the Pink Panther

2011-09-03T08:35:00.000-07:00

Our co-hort in all things fabulous, Vesna, has a two-page spread of poetry in the September, 2011 issue of Pink Panther Magazine. You can see the entire magazine here with hyperlinks or you can buy a print copy here.

The amazing cover, a painting by Janelle McKain:

Vesna's pages:

..in which you will see her lovely daughter Mila, and several of her poems, including this jewel:

Cogito ergo sum
A thought
Like a fish
Slippery
Promising it will grant me 3
wishes
once I hold it
And I am trying to catch it
Swimming in my own anatomy
Trying to draw a map
Lost in the labyrinth of my own
being.
Each left and right turn
has a “because”
But most of all
I really enjoy
Feeling lost.

--Vesna

Congratulations!! :)

The Five Keys

2011-09-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

I finally got my hands on a copy of the gorgeous book “The Five Keys to the Secret World of Remedios Varo.”

One of the things I have always liked about Remedios Varo’s work is the mysterious yet cohesive narrative present in her images. The Surrealist Movement was full of heady ideas and the study of dreams and alchemical traditions and psychology, but in general, its artists rather strictly adhered to a tradition of uncensored, automatic work: they painted dreams and bizarre pairings but made no effort to pull them together into some semblance of order. While Varo utilized many surrealist techniques, such as decalcomania, and firmly embedded her images in dreamy and surreal atmospheres, the paintings she presented in the last, explosively productive years of her life show a definite narrative purpose. In her essay In Search of the Miraculous, Tere Arcq meticulously outlines the connection Varo had made with the Russian mystic Gurdjieff’s group. She asks,

“What spurred her to distance herself from the automatist experimentation evident in her early works? One possible reason may lie in how Gurdjieff conceived of art. The Russian suggested that there were two kinds of art: objective and subjective. In objective art, the artist creates, but not so in subjective art: ‘With him ‘it is created’[…]this is where the whole difference lies.’ And this difference also lies at the heart of Gurdjieffian thought: man is a machine unable to do anything, to have control over his life and his fate—things simply happen to him. Only when he begins to do work on himself can man cease to be a machine and attain awareness. The subjective artist is a man-machine—an automaton that is incapable of doing anything…”

Towards the Happiness of Women

In the image above, the women are almost completely machine. They move about on wheels instead of feet, which in her own visual vocabulary would make them almost primates:

IMAGE: “Homo Rodans,” Varo’s “archeological discovery” built from the bones of fish and poultry, for which she produce an accompanying study in stuffy academic language.

Tiny wings direct their movement. Their source of happiness is the shop where they can receive updated parts:

Towards the Happiness of Women, detail from book
NOTE: images marked "from the book" can be seen at a much bigger size.

Arcq says, “To Gurdjieff, the automaton is an inferior being, a potential being that requires intense inner work to achieve a state of higher consciousness. Remedios Varo moved away from automatism because she was no longer an automaton…”

Where her Surrealist counterparts were focusing on the nightmarish visions that the events of the wars around them and the behaviors of the people involved might easily provoke, Varo was moving towards something else. Though she, too, suffered the dangers and upheavals of war—the Spanish Revolution and the armies of Hitler—she seemed to be approaching something better rather than running away. She arrived at her last home, in Mexico, and put her mind to study and creation, joining groups founded by the Russian mystics Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, analyzing her dreams and concocting recipes to control them with her friend Carrington, and painting.

Again from Arcq: “The Russian mystic P.D. Ouspensky stated that art is a means of knowledge and that by devoting himself to creation, the artist opens his mind to a multiplicity of possibilities, and is able to reveal enigmas and lead humankind toward the sphere of the unknown…so that his work might become the vehicle for the revelation of a higher reality.”

This is the purpose, to me, of art—of all creativity: not to mirror our worst side, to show us the beasts within and the darkness we are capable of—all of that is clear as day, in front of us, and is already presented to us on the television anyway. The purpose is to create a door in the wall, or at least a clerestory, some way for those of us in the gutter, as Wilde so famously said, to gaze upon the stars.
We contain the entire universe, all of its multiple versions, within us,

Center of the Universe

and to choose to enact the weakest, basest narrative is mindless, incomprehensible.
In the painting below, “The Red Weaver,” the eponymous weaver is fading into shadow, melting into the wall. In the background, two old skins hang from the ceiling and one from the wall. The red blood of life pulses through the weave of her creation as it lifts itself towards the window and out of the cramped room to sail through the sky.

Oppose this with the messy machinations of the puppets of astrological forces here:

Sympathy, from the web

or the repetitive, plodding (mechanical) movements those forces compel here:

In her essay, "Dreams of Alchemy," Fariba Bogzaran brings all of this together, saying :
"Although Remedios Varo was not interested in illustrating her dreams as some Surrealists did, many of her paintings suggest a complex 'dream-like' but conscious narrative with a wide range of possibilities, as is often experienced in lucid dreams where the dreamer gains awareness that he or she is dreaming and becomes a co-creator with the unconscious world (162)."

Therein lies the distinction: she is not an automaton, calling upon the knowledge of the subconscious and then doing no more than recording its suggestions. She has woken inside the dream, realized it is *a* dream, and reached out with her fingers to nudge certain details into place, to improve it. When Engel talks of her paintings, he also compares them to dreams: "In her best paintings, each of these locales convinces us that it is the one and only center of the universe, just as a compelling dream must depict not merely a reality but reality itself."

Embroidering the Earth's Mantel, from the book

cropped to avoid book crease

First, by her meticulous attention to detail, and through the use of surrealist techniques such as decalcomania, which allow for textures unattainable with a brush, she creates a world outside the normal realm of possibility, and makes it real, makes it convincing.

IMAGE: (the clouds of the sky are created using a technique called decalcomania, which involves pressing the paint between two sheets of paper and pressing the resulting pattern onto the canvas.)

IMAGE: (the tiny world looks just like ours, only now we see it from a "fourth" dimension, with its creators present. The curvature of the earth and the folds of mountains makes sense in this view)

Then, she subverts that "reality," with even further detail:

Detail from Embroidering the Earth's Mantel, from the book

The creators, Catholic school-girls trapped in a tower under the watchful and all-powerful gaze of the matron, endlessly weave a world they are never able to partake in. All the beautiful water! The oceans, the mountains! Secretly, the girl to the left has found a way out: if she is truly making this world, then how could she not? She creates a lover, and she plots their escape. Any minute now, they will solidify, and, reaching the earth below, be free. When we look at the world around us, every detail seems so firm, so real, and so the reality we believe we are seeing seems objective, permanent, unchangeable. But the same is true in a dream, until we wake from it. With this small detail, Varo shows us, that through a creative act (no matter how tiny), we can alter reality in massive ways; this idea is one of the main building blocks of all her work.

PART TWO

Another Gurdjieffan theme that finds life in Varo's paintings is again an idea purported by the new physics, and one that also fits in neatly with the idea of the entire world as a dream (one from which we don't particularly want to wake up, but in which we want to become aware): that is the idea that everything is alive. In the 1950s, a painter named Christopher Fremantle led lessons in Gurdjieff's teaching in Varo's neighborhood in Mexico. One experiment he liked them to practice weekly involved both professional artists and amateurs to take up their drawing pencils and paints and create. In an interview with Lillian Firestone, one of the group's members, Arcq learned about these sessions: "The study focused on observation: they would observe an object for a lengthy period, and then capture the impressions that the object in question had caused in them. 'No inanimate object was seen to be completely devoid of movement[...] We saw the 'livingness' even of rocks[...] Even a perfectly round orange was revealed as a complex kingdom of curves and whorls.'"

Visit to the Past (from book)

There are several things to think about in the above image. There is the life present in things, for example, that we see peeling itself out of the table, the chair-back, the walls, the sprouting carpet, and the dancing chair. The first thing the face emerging from the table makes me think of is the idea that the atoms that make up my body are constantly interchanging with those of everything around me, for example the table I am sitting. And if I sit at that table for 10-12 hours every day for 40 years, how much of that table has memories from my own existence inside it? Could anyone ever see those memories? Could anyone ever interact with them? Could they influence the behavior of the next person sitting at that desk? Could that person learn from my mistakes and gain strength from my strengths?

Recently, I ran across the word "spectrality," in an essay about De Chirico, Magritte, Balthus and Ernst from the catalogue of the 2010 show at the Palazzo Strozzi involving the works of all four. In talking about De Chirico and Ernst, the author writes, "In Ernst's view, the painter's job is to record what he 'sees' with his mind's eye, allowing his own will to interfere as little as possible. He inherited De Chirico's belief in the independent life of matter, taking the concept of 'spectrality'--in which concrete elements take on unexpected meanings--to new heights through his use of collage... The trends in European painting between World War I and the 1930s that opted for a realism capable of hinting at a 'second life' in things that transcended their purely visible aspect, were undeniably influenced by De Chirico's metaphysical art."

A concrete element-- for example, the table in "Visit to the Past," now takes on another meaning: that of the past. The table is not merely furniture; it is the carrier of memories, it is part of a room that has had life in it before the entrance of this new woman, it was once a central part of someone else's life in that room. Beyond that, it was once a collection of chunks of wood that a carpenter smoothed into planks, sealed against damage. and fixed into its present shape. It contains the love of that carpenter's hands, love that developed out of a life to lead those hands to work with wood. Before that, it was a tree, or several trees, and it lived in a forest, *it lived* amongst other trees and birds and animals, and if you lay your head on that table, ear down, you can hear the stream trickling over rocks in the distance. In this painting, all those things, all the lives that were ever connected in some way with that table, are here now. Around the legs of the table, grass and flowers grow again. A breeze blows, and a branch in the shape of a chair bobs and tilts.

That is the Surrealist definition of 'spectrality,' but in our everyday world, yourdictionary.com offers another--it is the noun form of the adjective 'spectral,': of, having the nature of, or like a specter; phantom; ghostly. This definition merges two of the ideas in this drawing: the ghost of the past and the thin, illusory (phantom) sheen of image that "reality" really is.

Harmony (from web)

Detail of Harmony (from book)

Engel describes the above painting: “In this complex and moving work, the forces of order (mathematical formulas, perfect geometric solids, the logic of musical theory) find themselves fiercely at odds with the chaotic disintegration of the room itself: the floor tiles buckle up from sprouting weeds, a bird has constructed a nest in the fabric of a chair, the scientist’s drawers and trunk are overflowing with debris, and, of course, the walls themselves are decomposing.” This conflict is there because, as we look around us, we are placing an order woven simply by faith and perspective as only a thin layer, a holograph, over the chaos of teeming atoms—parallel realities, endless possibilities. Your atoms, which are constantly interchanging with the atoms of the desk in front of you, the keyboard, the doorknobs, the grain of the wood flooring, the carpet fibers; there is no real distinction. There is no real reason you couldn't part the walls and pass through to the other side.

There is much, much more in this book. And the paintings are large, clear, and in beautiful color, with details pulled out and magnified. There are sketches, and images of hand-written dream-creating recipes, and the examples of her work range from her beginning Surrealist works in Europe to the unique style she created once she'd settled in Mexico. There are essays focusing on the architecture in her work, on the effect of dreams on her work, on the impact of all the time in cafes working on exquisite corpses, and on the beliefs of Gurdjieff's students and their expression in her work. It is gorgeous, a must-have.

Happy Birthday

2011-08-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

“The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”—Borges, in his essay “Kafka and his Precursors.”

Borges, photo by Paola Agosti

Today is the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges. He grew up in a house of books, played with his sister and their shared imaginary friends in the hallways of libraries and pathways of gardens, and spoke Spanish and English so interchangeably that he recalls being well-along in childhood before he understood that they were separate languages. (http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/index3.htm) He grew up in Argentina, Switzerland, and Spain, picking up more languages along the way. His first shy foray into the publishing world of poetry was in 1923, with a cover bearing a woodcut made by his sister Norah and the project financed by his father. And he gave it away “often surreptitiously, such as slipping copies into the pockets of editor’s overcoats!” (Ibid). By the 1930s, he was gaining recognition as a writer, but the economy was such that he needed a more dependable income, and so he began nine years of painful drudgery in a library, surrounded by colleagues with no interest in the books they catalogued.
Everything changed in 1938. His father died, and he himself hovered in a liminal world of fevered nightmare, wounded, infected, and hallucinating in the hospital for a month. He awoke terrified that this illness would have destroyed his creativity, and that terror drove him to focus and to take chances which soon resulted in Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

(Don Quixote, his image a map of his life, dreams, and memories, both completely false and imaginatively edited. Painting by Octavio Ocampo.)

He also wrote political essays, which landed him a promotion when Juan Peron rose to power: Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets.” He deferred, commenting that “dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers.” (Ibid).
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a fantastic example of how.

TLON, UQBAR, ORBIS TERTIUS
“For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism.”

In the first part of this story, the narrator stumbles upon his first hint of the existence of Uqbar, a country to whom 4 pages in some exemplars of a particular encyclopedia are given, though no other proof of its presence in the world seems obtainable. He describes the confusion created by this discovery, as he searches through atlases, news articles and other encyclopedias for any mention of the land named Uqbar. And he gives the highlights of what he learns from those four strange, solitary pages.

“The section on Language and Literature was brief. Only one trait is worthy of recollection: it noted that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön...”

In the second part, the narrator discovers, entirely by chance, a copy of the Hlaer to Jangr volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön:

“Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.”

He, along with others who have now stumbled upon these oddities, are convinced that no less than a team of “tlönistas” must be out there, creating the history, geography, poetry, art, architecture, mathematics, etc of this imaginary planet—one person would not suffice. The breadth of “knowledge” about the place is too much.

He says: “At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally.”

He then goes on to describe the language of the southern hemisphere of Tlön and extends directly from that language to everything else about it: existence upon it, the belief systems, the essence of its people:

“The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics [emphasis mine]- all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."”

What does this mean? What does it mean to say that there are no nouns, that everything is a verb? We can understand, if we speak this way, that the entire world is an act of creation, that we are not describing, but creating, that nothing simply is, it lives. What is a rock? To us, it is a thing. But if it can be described only using verbs, then we must understand that it exists for a purpose; it has its own existence, and without that purpose, it would not be. This makes me think of lucid dreaming, and—wait for it—Ars Memoria. If you were to fully analyze a scene in a dream, you would be thinking of the symbolic value of each object in the room or the landscape—the table, the chairs, the stain on the wall, the rock beside the path you were taking that you barely looked at. Why are those things there, in the dream? Your mind created them—each item, each speck on each item was created, intentionally. (The pipe is not just a pipe.) And if we were to say that the same is true of everything we see when waking? That would be part of the practice of Ars Memoria: to see the many possible meanings and links from each object and event to another, in order to better understand everything (thus memory is no issue) and eventually, to be able to affect those things through the mind. Don’t like the rock? The rock disappears. Poof.

The language of the northern hemisphere is different. There are only monosyllabic adjectives there, and a thing or an event is “named” by some combination of those adjectives. This means, in reality, that most things and events can only be described in a particular way once—thus, every moment of life is its own. There’s no such thing as a sunset, there is only the particular one that you are describing:

“There are objects composed of two terms, one of visual and another of auditory character: the color of the rising sun and the faraway cry of a bird. There are objects of many terms: the sun and the water on a swimmer's chest, the vague tremulous rose color we see with our eyes closed, the sensation of being carried along by a river and also by sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others; through the use of certain abbreviations, the process is practically infinite. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word. This word forms a poetic object created by the author.”

And then, Borges drops this bomb: “They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect.” This subordination is exactly what he has been describing. It is not merely a linguistic subordination of all words to the category “verb.” It is the subordination of every thought to that system of linguistic delivery. And stop for a moment to think about what this means if one spends all day making simplistic, vague sentences composed of infantile vocabulary, especially in the service of spreading scandals so common that their descriptions are merely fill-in-the-name-of-the-scandalizer forms.

Back to the story, we can see how language then affects math, which is still yet an expression of their beliefs: “maintain that the operation of counting modifies the quantities and converts them from indefinite into definite sums. The fact that several individuals who count the same quantity would obtain the same result is, for the psychologists, an example of association of ideas or of a good exercise of memory, “ and also: “The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry disregards parallel lines and declares that man in his movement modifies the forms which surround him.”

Let’s hope so. But more than hoping, let us be purposeful in our movements.

Then there is a postscript. The narrator uneasily recounts the events that have occurred more recently and the massive changes they have brought to society. The action really begins when some princess receives an expected package, and one of the items inside is an unknown element: a compass, and on it is inscribed something in a language of Tlön. “Such was the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of reality.”

Suddenly, the world is inundated with information from this once-unreal planet. And then…:

“Almost immediately, reality yielded on more than one account. The truth is that it longed to yield. Ten years ago any symmetry with a resemblance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?”

It isn’t that this is a foreign activity to us. It isn’t foreign at all. Not just the terrifying sweep of Nazism, but the very vast and detailed world which we claim to see in front of us right this minute could be no more than a dream, a perception, an organization of countless, teeming atoms into shapes and acts based on nothing more than a single (yet complex) belief--that Central Image I keep rambling about here. So, if the nightly news makes you sick to your stomach, maybe…
We could write another story. Draw a different picture.

The story is free to read and extremely highly recommended and linked HERE (English is on one side and Spanish is on the other; this is where I got the English quoted above.)

Artistic Precursors to the Lobotomy

2011-08-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

Extraction of the Stone of Madness, by Hieronymous Bosch

Something for you to chew on...

Extraction of the Stone of Madness (detail), by Hieronymous Bosch

The lobotomy, as an actual surgical procedure, wasn't performed (legally) until 1935. The above painting was created by Hieronymous Bosch in the late 1400s, and the one below in the late 1500s.

A Surgeon Extracting the Stone of Folly, by Pieter Huys

As usual, artists are far ahead of the crowd...

Thinking

2011-08-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

The boy is studying painting. He has a book that tells him “how to” and a table with toy soldiers which serve as his models, and he practices in a strictly geometrical garden (loosely based on the one at Versailles). Suddenly, a fairy-tale book which he had previously discarded begins to create something of its own: sleeping beauty wakes herself up and begins to pull herself out of the pages. Surprised and excited, he jumps up, knocking his rule-book and paintbrush to the ground and tipping over the red paint bucket, and the splashes from it begin to form birds which fly away.
Imagination always works better than logic :))

This drawing was created as a companion for the lovely Vesna’s poem of the same name:

Thinking

God
isn’t he just a kid
who found a box of paint
as he was running through Space?

He painted himself some friends to play
and then some toys and playgrounds.

He makes mistakes.
He makes masterpieces.

He spills the paint;
the red especially
makes the big mess.

And sometimes
he erases things and shakes the World
and makes us all afraid.

It Shouldn't Be Hard

2011-07-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

The belly dancer is trying very hard to be in control, but it's a tangle of wild rhythms...
Drawing by Zoe
Poem by Vesna:

It shouldn't be hard

How to get
The perfect beat
The ultimate sound

The one
that calls you
The one
that calms you
The one
that makes you
wild
The one
that makes you
reborn

It shouldn't be hard
But it is
There are so many ways
To touch with your palm
The ancient drum

The Way Through Doors

2011-07-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

(The Book of Knowledge by Brett Ryder; discovered via Phantasmaphile)

“--Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!
--To madness! Said Selah.” –The Way Through Doors (by Jesse Ball)

As I was preparing the last post on Ars Memoria (which probably serves as a sort of “Part One” to this post), I stumbled upon a book by Jesse Ball entitled The Way Through Doors. This is a book that has now been underlined heavily and filled with notes, and I was amazed at how it seemed to be almost a response to the question of how one goes about implementing the idea of re-arranging one’s knowledge of the world and one’s memory in order to consciously influence the present and future.

Selah Morse is out and about one day when he is struck by a lovely girl standing and looking up at a window in the building she has just exited. Horrified, he watches as a car strikes her, throwing her body into the air, and then drives off. She lands directly on her head. Selah rushes her to the hospital, where he soon puts himself into the position of boyfriend and caretaker of a girl with no memory. A girl he names Mora Klein. To keep her awake, and to help her jog her memory, he is to tell her stories of her own life. He begins by backing up only slightly, and re-telling very recent events with little differences here and there. Occasional differences. He begins the story with a bold lie, that of his own role, but only in exasperation with hospital bureaucracy and out of a desire to stay on hand and to help; after that, he takes little baby-steps into the world of lying—or creating. This is how the author creates the novel, and this is how Selah creates a life.

So, at first there are small differences. And sometimes, he backs up and re-writes a scene again. What is he doing? He is deciding his life. He is falling in love. He is shedding his old skin, putting on a fresh suit. He rewrites his entry into a new career, where he meets the message-taker named Rita, and she waits while he tries on his new “uniform,” an expensively-tailored suit:

“It fit perfectly. Pants, shirt, vest. There was even a pocket watch. My old clothes I put into a chute labeled,
THE FIRE THAT AWAITS US.”

I am reminded here of a quote from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, in the chapter in which he explains “How to Build a Universe.” First, he underlines the fact that before you build this universe, there is nothing. “Naturally,” he says, “you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle” of your big bang. But there is no such safe place, because before there is your universe, there is nothing. No space, no darkness, no time, no past. Then he says:
“The average species on earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly.”

Selah, and for that matter, Jesse Ball, does not go quite that far, as he stays human (though not everyone does) and keeps wearing his new suit, but he is willing to undergo supreme feats of physical labor, life-style change, and human-life-rule-bending. He does not protest when he finds he must go down to the bowels of the earth in order to get to the top of the highest building, or when he has to come to the same place three different times—each time by some new, even more impossible path—before he will be allowed upstairs to see the woman he seeks, Mora, the woman he is steadfastly working to invent. When the world breaks its own rules and throws everything upside-down (just as it did Mora), he adapts. A fantastic version of this occurs at The Beard House, where he enters and then hears the bolt slide shut behind him, and he is told he can never leave. The rules of the house are absurd, perhaps violently so, but he finds his feet quickly basically by acting as one does when confronted by a monster in a dream: remembering that the world is infinitely malleable, and that the one thing one must remember (I must remember this in a nightmare, but Selah applies it to reality, which is, I believe, the whole goal of learning to dream lucidly: to live lucidly) is that we make the world as we go. Every evil thing anyone says to you in a dream is a thing you are saying to yourself, and it follows that the same is true when you believe yourself to be awake. Selah applies this knowledge in his response to Caroline, the lady of the house. She very politely introduces herself and generously offers to get her guests a drink, yet responds venomously when they concede that a drink would be nice. This theme is played through several variations until finally Selah calmly takes hold of the servant’s chord and pulls. A resident gasps in shock, then cowers beneath a desk. The lady of the house storms in, asking who dares to be so bold, and Selah says, I did it. Now, bring me my drink. And on the double.

“—Very good sir, said Caroline, curtsying.
She left the room.
The guess artist and Piers Golp looked each other in shock.
--Not bad, said the guess artist. But how are we to get out of here?
--I have an idea, said S.”

Selah also tries telling the story from different perspectives, switching sometimes into third-person narratives, and sometimes having to pull himself out of a story before things get too hairy. For example, in one section, the man “seeking” the woman is named Loren Darius, and the woman is Ilsa, but as the story develops, he becomes too enmeshed in the emotional details and psychology of the character. He has been handed a curse, and he sinks into it, drowns in it, drives himself mad. The reader's anxiety grows also, what will happen? Just as he is about to break into violence, he’s stopped by another version of himself, his self in the new suit, who is now some stranger in a bar. A black-bearded blacksmith tells him,

“--You sit here a moment.
Loren sat. His mind was in a seething fury.
The young man in the blue-gray suit came over and patted him on the shoulder.
--My friend, he said, this is for you.
He pressed an orange into Loren’s hand. But it was not just any orange. It was the orange that Loren had been about to eat when news had come to him of his parents’ death. How had the orange been preserved so long? How could it still be fresh? Yet it was. Loren peeled the orange, and it was as perfect a fruit as he had ever seen. He took a portion and put it in his mouth, and the taste filled him. It was full of freshness and new promise, the lifting of obligation. He gave pieces of the orange to everyone in the room, and they all ate, smiling.
The young man knelt by Loren and whispered in his ear:
--Though we pass away now, the world will return to you again; fear not.
For at that moment the black-bearded blacksmith began to speak, and all that he said became more and more certain until only his subject remained.”[Italics mine]

And from there, a different version of a different aspect of the story begins. This time narrated by some other aspect of the author/dreamer/ narrator. The whole world changes. The anger of Loren is lost, the all-consuming rage and loss he had been driven by stops, and the world begins again, fresh as an orange, as a morning glass of juice. And everyone drinking the juice shares in the story, listens, experiences, and believes, and that,
My friends,
Is what makes something real.
If I dream a dream, and you dream it too, then it can’t really be “just” a dream, right? This is why we tell stories of what happened to us. We repeat the good things, the amazing things, the miracles we have experienced, over and over, and in as many different ways as is possible so that the people listening or reading will feel what we felt, because if they feel it, they believe it, and if they believe it, it’s real. So what happens if we start telling the bad stories over and over again? To everyone who will listen?
Hopefully, a black-bearded blacksmith will come grab us by the arm, sit us down, and tell us a better story.

As the narrator tells us,
“Strength is nothing, ferocity is a plaything; when life is waged as a war, grace is the only virtue, grace shown through nimbleness.”
Or, if you wish to exist for billions of years, be prepared to change completely, to do many 180-degree turns, to be knocked across the street and land on your head and wake up in a Czech hotel as a cockroach. To mix metaphors. To grow fur, change gender, learn to cross streams of reality and come out the other side.

Over and over again in this blog, I have written about the idea (as in the last post) of Murakami’s central image, as developed in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, an image that defines and then controls the way you see the world around you (I’ve posited, along with others, that this image is developed within the first five years of a person’s life). Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors also explores that central image, this time expressed as a map drawn on a kerchief hidden up Selah’s sleeve:

“...when you are a child, somewhere between two and four years of age, a night comes that you have a dream. In that dream you dream your entire life, from start to finish, with all its happinesses, its disappointments, its loves, its hates, its pains, its joys. Your entire life. The dream should have to last an equivalent amount of time, but somehow it happens in just one night…
Most people forget their dream. In fact, everyone forgets most of it. However, I was a precocious child. That morning I was left alone by myself with a large sheet of paper and a bucket of crayons. While my dream was still fresh in my head, I constructed a map of my life, using symbols and writing down what I could. Somehow I realized that to write too much would ruin it, and would make me sad in the end. Therefore, what I wrote down were mostly clues as to how to manage the difficult parts.” (78)

Now, if this dream were completely subconscious, that is, if he had indeed forgotten it as soon as he woke up, he would simply be trapped in the image. He would be propelled forward by it, trapped inside the invisible walls of the image, never to escape. But he remembers guideposts. Only guideposts. Not details—details would also trap him. If the whole path is already completely defined, then you simply follow it, right? What the map he has made shows us is that each signpost that he’s made can be interpreted in various ways, and that is what he is doing throughout the book; he is trying out different meanings for them, the different possible paths from each one.

Early in the book, the narrator meets up with the Guess Artist, and this artist accompanies him until the end. What is a guess artist? He is a man who stands on the pier under an awning and guesses what you are thinking. Different people will walk up and ask, what am I thinking? He has a rule: he always gets at least two guesses (at some points in his past, he has asked for three). Usually, the first one, as detailed and meaningful as it might be, is not the “correct” thought, though sometimes it is still a thought belonging to that person. He doesn’t just guess a sentence, he guesses a situation--an image, you might say—which encapsulates not just a present fleeting thing, an addition to the grocery list, but a situation in the person’s life, and how it relates to that person’s life, and that person’s questions regarding both those things.

“—You are both thinking the same thing, said the guess artist. You are wondering whether the sun will ever go down, since you have been traveling now for six years on airplanes, staying ahead of the sun, and you have finally decided today to let yourselves see a sunset.
--That’s not true, said June. I design robots for use in private industry. We have an apartment on the West Side.
--Okay, said the guess artist. Three chances, right?
--Okay, said June. Shoot.
--You’re thinking about the cat you had when you were a child. There was one spot on its fur, to the left of its tail, which would never sit smoothly. The fur always stuck up. Somehow you thought that because the fur was always sticking up there, the world could never reward anyone with exactly what they wanted. This belief was for a long time unconscious in your head, but earlier today you realized why you believe what you believe. Furthermore, now you feel that it is certainly true. The cat died when you were nine. It is buried by the gate of your parents’ house in Tensshu.
--What is the cat’s name? asked June.
--You are being very careful not to think of the cat’s name, said the guess artist.
Then his expression changed. He looked at Takashi.
--The cat’s name was Octopus.
June gave Takashi a withering look.
--Don’t you have any self-control? she asked.
Takashi shrugged.
June looked at the guess artist.
--You’re pretty good, she said”

Several things are happening here. First, we can see how a single childhood image (even one that isn’t instantly unraveled into an entire dream-life which encapsulates every waking detail that later unravels in your world) can control the beliefs and therefore the actions and therefore the possibilities of a person. Also, we get a glimpse into what an artist or writer does. He or she looks at the people passing by and imagines whole lives, scenarios—the central mental image and its resulting possibilities—which might belong to them. Based on what? Based on the image of that person: the hairstyle, body language, sway of the hips, curve of the ear, glint of light off the eye, clothing, jewelry, skin-color. See how much an image means? See how much it influences? In your dreams, your different beliefs come up and talk to you as characters. They look and act a certain way, and they influence your feelings and dream-actions in a certain way. They are telling you, if you pay attention, something about your life. And if you remember that you are dreaming, if you remember that you are in control, if you remember that at any time, you can jump into a different character and look at things differently (they are all you!!!) you can completely change that other character’s behavior, too. As Selah does with Caroline. And in this novel, Selah is doing what the guess artist does; he is imagining full scenarios, completely new ones—for he is not tied the way we usually think we are to a single scenario. Mora doesn’t remember anyway, and he only has guideposts on his map.
The trick, maybe, is only to completely immerse yourself when you like what’s happening. Otherwise, climb out. Change your name. Cut your hair. WAKE UP.

Selah gives the reader a little more help than that, even. He is by vocation a pamphleteer, currently at work on what will be his greatest pamphlet ever, that of a World’s Fair full of only the most impossible and amazing things of the world—like the best dream ever, the story you always wanted to tell, the story of a wide-eyed child back from the most wondrous trip into the world he’s ever made: “and then, and then, and then…!” (Because what you focus on forms the world.) But he has previously written other pamphlets, including “The Foreknowledge of Grief,” which explains how to find (create) the love of your life, his own advice, which is what he’s now trying to follow. (He has a plan; he’s trying to make it real.)

“First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one’s door. No, that is simply going out. That’s what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.
So, one goes out into the world, and then one wanders about.”

And that is what he does. And as he wanders, the rules change, Mora morphs from Rita to Ilsa to Sif and back again to Mora and Sif and Rita and Ilsa. And then….
Read the book.

Ars Memoria with Cat

2011-07-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

“Every event in the visible world is the effect of an ‘image,’ that is, of an
idea in the unseen world. Accordingly, everything that happens on earth is only
a reproduction, as it were, of an event in a world beyond our sense perception;
as regards its occurrence in time, it is later than the supra-sensible event.
The holy men and sages, who are in contact with those higher spheres, have
access to these ideas through direct intuition and are therefore able to
intervene decisively in events in the world. Thus man is linked to heaven, the
suprasensible world of ideas, and with earth, the material world of visible
things to form with these a trinity of primal powers” (Occult America, Mitch
Horowitz).

This drawing has formed as a process of exploring so many different ideas, it’s difficult to put them all down in a manner that seems even in the least bit linear, i.e. following logically from one point to another without jumping around all over the place. But here’s an attempt.

In one of my favorite books of all time, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, author Haruki Murakami explores, among other things, the idea that a central mental image drives everything that occurs to us and around us in the physical world. The image could be of a small, idyllic village surrounded by a high wall, with a few people placed in various spots. Maybe there’s snow. What happens is this: the snow will mean something, maybe cold, isolation, loneliness (maybe beauty, perfect smoothness and clarity, crisp clean air in your lungs). The way each of the people are dressed will give some hint as to profession or place in society, which in turn means something about the “types” of people you expect to see (and therefore see), and the way the village is structured or something about the walls can tell you something of the rules governing interaction or the innate behavior of the villagers towards each other. This meaning-laden image is the way you see the world. It will control your behavior, your interactions, and it will color the behavior of others, giving it meaning that it might not otherwise have. It will decide what kind of news you receive, what kinds of problems or miracles you are aware of, etcetera. Now, for part of your life (I’ve rambled on and on about this here before, and suggested that this “part” of your life lasts about five years), you are creating that image. Afterwards, you are driven by it, a little slave imagining himself as a free-willed being (so yes, you are both free-willed and fated).
What I’m insisting here is, if you commit yourself to the process, you can change that image later.

So here’s the girl’s image, shown via a cut-away of her skull: a princess trapped in a tower, waiting for her savior. There are monsters above her, and below her is a long way to fall, and she is weeping (her tears slide down and mingle with her hair, finally creating a small pool or lake in the ruins of an old castle below). And she is waiting. Because in all the stories, if the princess is good and beautiful, and she waits, her prince will come and fix things right up.

So she accepts certain details in the world, which you can see throughout. The spires of the church (tower) hold up a drawer borrowed from Dalí to hold the pomegranate, sometimes called an apple, which represents the sinful bite that Eve took which sent us all spiraling away from the garden of Eden. The fact that the two fruits are confused is interesting if we keep in mind the older story of Persephone, who was kidnapped and taken to Hades against her will (princess trapped in an upside-down tower). In that story, she would have been freed, when her location was finally discovered, except that in the meantime, she’d eaten three tiny pomegranate seeds—out of hunger, not sin—and anyone who has eaten in Hades stays in Hades (although later, it is worked out that she will stay down there for one month for each seed out of every year, thus creating winter). So, just like in the garden, the memory of what she has already done continuously punishes her, puts her in a place of darkness and suffering and brings winter and death to the whole world. Because that is the story that is told. Because why? God is not big enough to forgive even that transgression? Zeus is not strong enough to tell Hades to stick it? Sometimes we know that the monsters (and devils) are a figment of our imagination; sometimes we don't. Sometimes, we believe in a god, and we imagine him with hideous attributes. Here, the pomegranate is in the drawer of her false heart—her mirror-left, not her real left. That’s important.

“There was a time prior to the 20th century when imagination and memory were
seen as one and the same thing, Ars Memoria. Memoria was the old term for both.
It included the idea of memory, imagination, the unconscious and reverie. James
Hillman writes, “Memoria was described as a great hall, a storehouse, a theatre
packed with images. And the only difference between remembering and imagining
was the memory images were those to which a sense of time had been added, that
curious conviction that they had once happened” (Hillman, Healing Fiction).

She angles her head and gaze towards a particular constellation, that of the Centaur. According to Wikipedia, “This half-human and half animal composition has led many writers to treat them as liminal beings,” that is, beings occupying the uncertain boundary between two worlds. That is what I want him to do here. First, he is between animal and man, also he is between the stars and the earth; this centaur is her prince, not the one she is to wait for, but the one she is imagining; not simply a man, not simply human, but something more. And she will push him to become real. He drops to earth, attempting to incarnate, first as the two horse-headed men, a concept borrowed from the maquettes of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who flounder in the pool of tears, not quite what she needs, and then as the two horsemen, leaving the ruins to travel up the path. She imagines him in the stars, she imagines him in the reflection in the water, and he struggles to solidify, to incarnate out of that faint line of light in the sky, out of that faint reflection, and finally, he does. He becomes flesh. He becomes these horseback twins. A different constellation altogether. Gemini.

Centaurs were generally, in mythology, basically rowdy teenagers—but there was a very notable exception, named Chiron. Chiron “represents honor, moderation, and tempered masculinity” (Wikipedia), and he is a doctor. That connects him to the horseman holding the caduceus; of the Gemini twins, who were once upon this earth as Castor and Pollux, one is a medical man (the other is a boxer, so, again a liminal area, two distinct sides of masculinity: the listening and healing, and the fighting). And Castor and Pollux bring us back to the title and the opening quote; they bring us back to Ars Memoria, because history tells us, or mythology tells us, or someone’s memory, anyway, that the Ars Memoria was born in the rubble of a natural/ supernatural disaster, helped along by the twin gods Castor and Pollux:
A man named Simonedes had been hired to give a flowery speech honoring the host of a huge banquet in an elaborately wealthy hall. He had, in a manner that was not unknown at the time, introduced his introduction with yet another flowery speech, this one honoring the twin gods (who were later turned into the Gemini constellation). Afterwards, the host had given Simonedes only half of his pay, snidely remarking that he could get the other half from Castor and Pollux, since they were so great.

And he did. There came a knock at the door, and Simonedes was called to respond to the summons of two unknown men. As he exited the hall, seeking his callers in vain, the building collapsed behind him, killing everyone inside. The bodies were so mutilated, they could not be identified, and it was by visualizing the great table and the interactions of the people at it that Simonedes was able to identify each corpse so that the families could give them a proper burial. Thus began the Ars Memoria, a method of active, visual, representative memory, so successful that it was referred to by some as witchcraft—a deadly accusation at times--, and it was, in fact, believed by its users to offer some control over the physical world (again, twisting memory and imagination into a single thing, again operating in liminal space).

The idea here is that she finds some obscure detail, some story that maybe shouldn’t resonate with her, and she focuses on it until it does. She’s unhappy with her lot, so she looks outside her lot. She finds some idea, she commits to it, and she makes it real. She is trapped, her life mapped out before her by the image she created before she knew what she was doing, created really by the circumstances of some mixture of her genes and her “lot” in the first five years of her life, and yet, if she unfocuses her eyes until something bizarre and outside her reality can be picked up and pounced upon, if she focuses hard on some meaningless detail completely outside her normal experience, she can reroute her associations, she can change everything. Her memory of how she got there, and her understanding of how to get out. Ars Memoria. With cat, which I’ll get to now.

III. They head up the hill, which we see is only a mantel, the mantel borrowed from Remedios Varo’s “Embroidering the Earth’s Mantel,” where she reflected on the feeling of a Catholic female, who at once creates the world but takes no part in it herself, cloistered away from events and color and living, trapped high up in a tower with her had down, focused on the rules of her task. In her painting, Varo imagined and then incarnated an escape, a hidden embroidered detail of herself and her lover climbing down the wall and into the world. Here, we are doing the same, first in the form of the cat, who, far from feeling trapped in the tower, uses it as a better vantage point from which to leap for a star, thus pushing the constellation of the centaur to earth and beginning the minute changes that grow into other changes, that butterfly-effect which rolls around this little universe. Underneath the pathway is the dark and shadowy forest of the unknown, where our once weeping princess is now swathed in an explorer’s attire, and she is wandering off the edge of the universe. She is followed, not led, by her saint—

IV. St. Mark: patron saint of painters, interpreters, and law-clerks, (shown as) a lion, which brought to mind, for me, the green lion of alchemy, and he was actually accused, in his time, of sorcery (witchcraft, again!). These leaves all around, the ones swirling down from the sky, burrowing out of the cathedral and landing on the tops of the trees which hold up the path over the dark and frightening forest—these leaves and the blooms here and there are of the datura plant, of special use to witches, especially for love potions. As is usually the case with a witch’s weed, too much is poison, but just enough can do some pretty amazing things. Among the effects of ingestion of datura are “a complete inability to differentiate reality from fantasy, and amnesia. (Just a side note to the curious, I don’t recommend eating it. You have to really, really know what you’re doing, or it’s really, really bad news.)

Back to Saint Mark, so we can go back to that rubble from which everything is arising: tradition had it that St. Mark’s boat was blown by accident to Venice, and that angels came to him saying he would be buried there, so, many years after his death two Venetian men stole his remains from Alexandria and brought them home with them, ostensibly to protect them from desecration at the hands of the Saracens. A church began to be built to house the remains, and during the building, those relics were lost. Upon completion of construction, “it was resolved, in June 1094, to keep a fast throughout the city, and to make a most solemn procession through the church, without devout supplication to the Almighty that He would be pleased to reveal the place of concealment of the holy relics. And, lo! While the procession was moving, of a sudden light broke from one of the piers, a sound of cracking was heard, bricks fell upon the pavement, and there, within the pier, was beheld the body of the saint, with the arm stretched out, as if he had moved it to make an opening in the masonry” (Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, William Shepard Walsh). So, the constellation is brought to earth via a mighty leap from the cat escaping the tower; the centaur goes through one permutation that doesn’t serve him well, there in the lake created by a waterfall of tears and tumbling hair crashing down over the rubble of the great disaster which started the whole history of the Ars Memoria, out of which finally emerge Castor and Pollux, the twins who saved Simonedes from the disaster, as a gracious show of gratitude for his public praise—twins who here embody the man and horse combination, one the fighter and one the healer; but also, if we concentrate on the detail of this rubble-with-spring borne of tears and birthing new creatures (in whatever form we need them to be in order to make sense of them), we can just imagine that St. Mark was also unearthed from that ripped open building, and alive, why not, and also…a big cat. So there he is, calmly following our now intrepid explorer through the darkest, unknown regions of her own mind and off the edge of the universe--

V. –which does, in fact, curve up around that other (Leo the lion, the big cat, of course) constellation to continue in some other form with people of a castle: the red queen and her puppet, the as-yet-unenlightened Alice in a topiary garden of not-quite-real people and, well, cat. It looks like, perhaps, an old attempt at a fantasy escape which didn’t quite work out for her (well, she woke up, right?).

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards” (White Queen, Through the Looking Glass).

In argument form: Things don’t change through a process of logic. It’s a focus on detail that ends up making a huge perspective shift of the sort that ends up somehow changing the universe—tomorrow, you wake up, and things are completely different, yet we believe that all of history as moved us inexorably to this moment. One example of this is what happens to your life when you focus on all your weaknesses, your failings, your inabilities, and then go out and try to do something. Spend a week like that and then share your life story with someone, and you know what it will sound like: a laundry-list of disasters and tragic flaws and chance occurrences that insisted on a hopeless existence (the theme of the movie Babel comes to mind). On the other hand, don’t spend a week like that. Why would you? The way we tell a story, from a ghost story around the campfire to bedtime story for a little one (that we don’t want to scare) to the story of our own lives (even the evening news! That counts!) is the way we form our own lives. It’s Ars Memoria, both memory and invention, past and future, and now.

Dancer, Actor, Puppeteer, Choreographer, Director, Painter…

2011-06-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

A New, Gorgeous Book of Art:

The first thing that strikes me about Clive Hicks Jenkins’ art is the motion of it. Always, there is a sense of an action not quite complete on the canvas, a life un-stilled by the process of its recording by the artist. The figures, shadows, and hidden recesses in his massive conté drawings, prints, and paintings, as well as in his sketches are all seething with life. And none of it is sterile motion—the figures move with purpose, driven by an uncontrollable emotion. As Marly Youmans describes “The Congregation of Birds” in her chapter of this new monograph, “The legs are drawn upward in a posture that at once suggests slumber, dance, and leaping” (109).

St. Francis is thus caught not in one moment of time, but in his being. His knees are red from kneeling, and indeed, maybe he is just now dropping to them, or rising from them, but whatever the motion is, it is some ecstatic motion, full of the joy of being and worshipping and proclaiming his love.

Each painting starts with sketches, and you can imagine the atelier littered with them, some taped to the wall or the easel, some scattered across the floor for the artist to dance across, eyeing them from all directions and from all positions, and in motion. A sketch becomes a maquette, a flat puppet of moving parts which then gets tacked on the wall, only to shift and leap and twist into some other position every time the artist turns his back until suddenly, everything is exactly as it should be, the core of the character is somehow distilled in a particular motion, and the painting begins.

Here is another fact of Clive’s painting techniques which many of the authors in this book touch on: every canvas begins with red. Red oxide paint covers every inch, and is there beneath every figure, forming what Clive describes as the life-blood pulsing just beneath the skin, which you can sometimes just see, as in the St. Francis painting, where, as Youmans points out, the kneeling has left its mark, or the hint of the stigmata ghosts along his foot; or in this painting of St. Hervé and the Wolf, the heat of the complex emotions between the two burns through.

There is a miraculous moment in this monograph, when Marly Youmans writes a fictional piece alongside the painting “Touched,”

a story which glows and unravels and sharpens with the intensity of a perfect, lucid dream. In this dream, Clive is taking tea with Jean Cocteau:

“The most marvelous light, Cocteau says, gesturing at a raspberry-coloured tree. He sloshes tea on the tablecloth in his enthusiasm.
The clothes of the painter and Cocteau are dusted in lime-green. A few petals cling to their jackets and hair. The two drink more tea and talk about dreams and visions while clouds draw blue shadows over them and then pass by. The sunlight steadies.
Nothing appears soft-edged or blurred. Everything stands distinct in the light. Every line is as strong as the facet of a crustal, every colour as rich as a jewel.”

At this point, something miraculous occurs, which I will leave you to discover in the book itself. Marly follows the moment of revelation thus:

“The clarity of a dream, he says.
The light increases enormously, and the paths and trees burn, every pebble and twig distinctly present. The painter’s hands tremble as he drinks in the brilliance and crisp edges of the garden, the glimpses of saints, and the young Virgin, her crimped hair verring from her head like a cockeyed halo.
This is what I wanted, he thinks, more light and every intent so clear. Colour that says anything is possible. Nothing hidden (104, Youmans).”

And that is what he achieves, as well, and the book is full of examples of it, large, lush reproductions on almost every page. There is a wide range of writing-style in here; all of it is fascinating. Kathe Koja describes the dance of the maquettes with a wonderful lyricism, and explores another of the main draws—for me—to Clive’s art: where it takes you. As she quotes him in a description of the beginnings of his journey through the theatre-life, she grasps hold of a powerful and telling phrase:

Clive Hicks-Jenkins: I used to be a puppeteer, my first job after I left ballet school. It was a serious company, presenting an intriguing blend of techniques…I became expert with marionettes, learned the techniques of black theatre, was deft with shadow puppets and rod puppets of all persuasions…As a dancer, I appeared with puppets as my partners.
By the time I was through, I had been spoiled for my initial choice of career as a dancer. Too many ideas flying around my head! Instead I evolved into a choreographer, a stage director and designer, and I carried with me the puppeteer’s love of masks, mechanical simulacra, and sleight-of-hand.

“‘Sleight of hand’ is an apt, and delicious, description for the basis of the painter’s art: deft, arduous, painstaking motor skill yoked with the power to make of what is not there, what is; not to deceive but to enlarge the experience of seeing, and enable the eye and the heart to take in what the creating, presenting mind intends: a man, a saint, a bird or a beast, where there are ‘really’ only strokes of colour on a flat plain. Is art ‘real’? Yes. And no (142, Koja).”

Not to deceive but to enlarge the experience of seeing. Exactly.

And back to the collection of moments or emotions caught in each of his paintings that makes each of them so un-still, so alive: that feeling is—it must be—a result of the contact between the painted and the painter, a moment described once in the old myths of the sculptor whose Venus came to life: he had formed her, yet she already ‘was,’ and the creator and created met in that electric moment of the not-real revealing itself as real.

“…a maquette is posed, exercised, put through various paces on the studio wall, but the ultimate gift of this dance is neither completely controllable nor wholly imagined beforehand: the maquette’s own being is a gift to Hicks-Jenkins in his process, and to the finished piece of work as a whole (146, Koja).”

Anita Mills also addresses this motion. She goes through the artist’s old sketch books and describes the moment when she feels he came to that particular ability, that unique talent of combining all his talents into one, or choreographing and taking part in a dance with the scene unfolding beneath his hand. Surprisingly, this moment occurred not in a ‘narrative’ painting (in the usual sense of the word!), but in plein air drawing—in landscape sketches, when he suddenly realized that he wasn’t making maps or topographical records; he was capturing the mood, motion, weather—the life of the moment. And as she states, ..."he has a deft ability to abstract a subject, distilling it to its most essential spirit (131 Mills)."

Before this review becomes longer than the book itself, I should close with a few clear statements about it. First of all, it’s big, and hardbound, and heavy (and red), and yet I have carried it with me everywhere ever since it arrived in the mail. It is full of large, gorgeous reproductions spanning Clive’s entire career, from a lovely drawing of Nefertiti impressively rendered by an awe-struck nine-year-old through stage sets and costume designs from his theatre days, and right up to his most recently (at this time) shown work, “Christ Writes in the Dust: The Woman Caught in Adultery.” The writing throughout is a fantastic mix of biography, analysis, and creative response, and on every page there is something to make you stop, ponder, and dream. And create.
I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
--zoe

Leonora Carrington

2011-05-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

I hope for time to write something soon, but cannot simply ignore her passing here...

Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, both of whom I've written about before on this blog, were very close friends who formed two ends of a female surrealist "triumverate" in Mexico after they fled there from Europe during World War II. Carrington and Varo spent a lot of time writing alchemical recipes, which they tried out on their unsuspecting friends, and bizzare and magical stories which often included suspiciously familiar characters. "The Hearing Trumpet" is a fascinating book, full of magic and a very dry humor, and highly, highly recommended. I have sometimes felt that surrealist art tries so hard not to make sense that it doesn't, and surrealist writing has been the same. But this book succeeds in both worlds; it is not limited by reality, but it still can be enjoyed and comprehended by those of us still living in reality :)

(photo from Carrington's obituary in the Guardian)

Carrington's paintings are filled with meticulous details, and her color work is amazing, but there are also her sculptures to enjoy--her other-worldly creatures peel themselves off the canvas and fill out into three-dimensional reality... photos of sculptures from this blog...

Far from dying early and penniless as her father ferociously forecast when she announced her plans to run off to be an artist with Max Ernst, who was twice her young age, she passed yesterday much mourned, a national treasure of Mexico, a treasure in every way, at 94 years of age.

Climb Higher

2011-04-28T09:09:00.000-07:00

(Not Your Usual Saint)..All artwork in this post is by Stelios Faitakis.

Stelios Faitakis’ works show influences of Byzantine iconography, Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Gustav Klimt’s swirling golden designs, and the Mexican muralists of Diego Rivera’s time: The working class, muscular and giant in their presence, take on the ominous power of grey factories, military planes, masked policemen, and many-headed (human-headed!) hydras against a shimmering golden backdrop. They are often haloed. The world is stacked, layer upon layer, and there are wood-block waves and flames and ghostly heads. Everything swirls together to create a painting or a mural that is completely “Faitakis.”

Above, on the ground we have destruction: a tsunami (notice the bodies and planks in the water), a monster led by human minds with a forking, satellite-tail, and a dark, polluting factory. There is no dry land; there is no safe footing. But there is a ladder; with some struggle, one can pull oneself out and up and into the soft gold “heavens.” The ugly disaster of physical life is contrasted with the golden eternity of a higher spiritual work.

Faitakis feels that art is part of human growth, and is a method of communication that is best when understood by all viewers. He longs to cover the “ugly” walls of Athens with public works, narratives of the average man overcoming his own monstrosity--and he has begun this daunting task already.

Trees as martyrs?

Discovered HERE.

Who's Ready for Some Pills?

2011-04-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Part One is HERE.

Having dropped all prescribed meds, now, my thinking is crystal-clear. The sense of emergency is back, eating my food, ruining perfectly healthy conversations.
But I’m not losing sight.
The only thing I might regret, I’m thinking, is having flushed all my Adderall. This is while I’m scrubbing someone’s day-old sprayed diarrhea off the toilet bowl of my local chain bookstore in my best skirt. That was not the extended release formula, that eases you into a calm wakefulness until bedtime. That was old-style flavor, the pill that makes you giddy and grits your teeth, makes you ok to put off things you really wanted to do because you know you can do them later, you’re never going to sleep again. At least, initially.
I’m wondering why it is the closing crew thought this would be easier to take care of in the morning. I’m wondering if the lady that missed the bull’s eye, was she thinking maybe she’d catch cooties from the public toilet if she leaned down to wipe up her own shit? But really, mainly what I’m thinking is, I’ve got to get out of here.
Looking down into the toilet, the other thing it’s reminding me of, other than my job in general, is those pills. In the headiness of my grand statement about The Way I’m Going to Live My Life, I failed to consider what I could make on the streets with them.
As opposed to, say, $7 an hour.
I’m thinking about going back to that doctor, paying for the office visit as, say, an investment.
And seeing as I don’t have any health insurance to stop me, I’m thinking how many doctors could I visit before it stops being profitable.
I’m thinking all this and the manager pokes her head in, and with her ex-grade-school teacher pretend-friendly voice, she singsongs: “How clean are you trying to get it in there? You’re almost missing the morning meeting!”
Not the one about the frequent-buyer discount cards?
My best skirt, it’s got a wet spot on it now that’s seeping through to my skin. I’m not sure where it came from.
“You haven’t even wiped down the sink area yet,” she’s saying, and I can hear her breath coming out in little grunts as she stoops to pick up stray paper towels.
I’m still weighing the meeting versus the crusty diarrhea when I remember all the Paxil and Prozac and Celexa piled up in my cabinets.
These doctors, they’re like little prostitutes. That first impression, it’s all they need. They just match it up to whatever the sales rep told them, and bam, the fifteen minute session’s over and your pocket’s empty. It’s all about that first meeting, because after that, you’re too numb to complain. Some of these drugs, they’ll tell you in the research, they might even increase the instance of suicide. All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem like such a big deal after all, pulling that trigger.
People get so lost in life. Like all of us here at the bookstore. In school or suddenly finished with school, we’ve discovered we like to read and we’ve discovered we need an income, and here’s this no-brainer: work in a bookstore. It’s low-key, buys you a little time to start your own novel or work on your paintings, or figure out how you’re going to find a real wage but without selling your soul, and on top of everything, you can hang around with people who like books, you can read books, you can discuss books with customers, recommend your favorites, Your Life and Books. So you start your job and you find out it’s like shelving at WalMart, it’s like dusting at WalMart, it’s like cleaning the toilets at WalMart. Your boss used to be the boss at WalMart. No one wants you chatting on the clock when you could be looking busy, it needs to be clear to everyone who’s a customer and who’s a friend of yours that came in to say hello, and there is certainly not ever a time when you might be leaned up against the help-desk waiting to help someone, and reading a book.
Lit. class, it leads you to think certain things about life. The workplace quickly puts an end to all that. So it’s no real task to understand that plenty of people, not just those of us who grew up in the foster system, are cramming themselves into a ball on that couch with a broken facial expression and a broken method of self-expression, waiting for someone to explain to them why they failed The Test, after studying so hard. And then they’re handed some pills, pills which clear up nothing.
After all the different doctors, all with the same solution-style for any problem, I’ve got a good half a year’s supply of apathy and cobwebs for your head in my cabinet.
My boss, she’s making huffy, stamping noises while she squeaks cleaner liquid around the mirror. God forbid these people be forced to behold their beauty through a few smudges, it’d be almost like zits.
My boss, she doesn’t just toss the used paper towels into the trash can, she smacks the little flippy lid around so I can hear it rock and know she’s angry.
I’m thinking, you probably can’t get much for Celexa and Prozac and Paxil on the streets these days, seeing as the companies are so eager to pass them out. But that’s not to say they don’t have their uses.
I’ve taken my little name tag off now, and I’m scraping at a stubborn spot, and she says, “Whenever you’re done doing whatever it is you’re doing, you can come to the meeting.”
I continue scraping at the shit stain. What do these people eat? I don’t hear any slammy noises, so my guess is she’s waiting for me right there, and I don’t have to peek around the corner to know she’s got her arms folded across her chest and a squeezed-up smile on her face like your teacher’s when you’re fucking up a presentation in front of Important People.
The problem with my boss is, she could really use some Prozac. At this stage, with her anxiety levels, she might need a cocktail of some sort, two nice, calming, anti-unhappy pills. Maybe three.
She’s just so unhappy.
Finally, I just start unraveling the toilet paper. Fuck this place. I stuff as much as I can into the toilet and lift my foot up to flush. As I walk out of the stall, I don’t wash my hands. I grab hers, instead, and open the door. “Let’s get to that meeting,” I say.

Tango in a Box IX

2011-04-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

Emily and Her Troll Head, by Travis Louie

Part One is HERE.

When you start your life out like I did, waiting for mom and dad to come home until the police come and it’s already been dark outside long enough for you to pee on yourself twice wrapped up inside the curtains holding your breath in case someone else is in the house with you, when you start out there, waiting, peeing again as strange men finally break open the front door and start flipping on all the lights, calling your name even though you’ve never heard their voices before, well, the relationships you’re going to build after that are heavily affected.

By the time your second mommy doesn’t come home, well, you’re sort of building a pattern, and then you might say all your relationships are the same. They’re all with DFACS psychologists and psychiatrists. Social workers. Teachers who go the extra mile. They all want to talk to you about what happened, meaning they want to be your friend. You bump around to different schools and different homes and different shrinks and you begin to think that that’s what a friend is, the guy who sits down with you and says, “Let’s start from the beginning.”

Because the people who don’t talk to you like that, regular everyday people, well, you can’t help but notice that if they look at you at all, it’s to check their reflection out in your glasses.

And then came Johnny. Johnny looked at my purple and black eye folding over on itself and just never asked “What happened?”

Because, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?

I mean, they have the folder right there in front of them, right?

And the prescription pad’s already out, they already know what they’re going to prescribe you, but they, like everyone else, they think that that’s the question that sets them apart from the crowd, the one that shows they care:

“Do you want to talk about what happened?”

And Johnny, he wasn’t checking his nose in my glasses, either. He looked straight at me, but I never had to formulate any stupid goddamned sentences to express my feelings about the burglars who turned out to be cops who kidnapped me and never let me see my mom and dad again.

Memory and Perception

2011-04-19T14:00:00.000-07:00

“Into the Woods,” by Alexander Korzer-Robinson

“As we remember the books from our own past, certain fragments remain with us while others fade away over time – phrases and passages, mental images we created, the way the stories made us feel and the thoughts they inspired. In our memory we create a new narrative out of those fragments, sometimes moving far away from the original content. This is, in fact, the same way we remember our life – an ever changing narrative formed out of fragments. This mostly subconscious process of value judgments and coincidence is what interests me as an artist and as a psychologist.”
--Alexander Korzer-Robinson

Although as he cuts he leaves the images in the place they would have been found in the book, he creates a new relationship between those images by directly linking them, removing the many pages of text and images in-between, by putting a spotlight on them, by bringing them out of the author’s context and into the sculptor’s, and then into the viewer’s. The images, stripped of the text and the order of relation that the original author had given them (unless you consider the Original Author to have been the Creator of the Universe), are given a new relational order by the sculptor that means something to him but will easily stir completely different associations from any viewer, based on books they have read—because of the format--, as well as on their own experiences.

I am, of course, a sucker for old castles that instantly take my mind to tales of haunted families and grimly obsessed, fearfully driven scientists...

And the above image made me think of the discovery of the New World, right off, even though the man pointing forward and coming out of the dense foliage is, upon closer scrutiny, dressed like an old Roman. The “old ways” are small, beneath him; he heads fearlessly over them, a giant...

“Suspended Lion,” by Alexander Korzer-Robinson

There are so many different perspectives in the above image: the giant lion, heading downwards, the buildings facing one way, the book facing another, and then the topographical view, the map, offering yet another—this one brought me back to all the thoughts of physics and the many, many worlds all occupying the same space at the same time...the idea that we pick and choose what we see, what we even notice, what we *live*...

And this one? What does it make you think of?

Tango in a Box VIII

2011-04-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

PART ONE IS HERE

Mad Bunny Has Many Friends, by Yves Lecoq

You’d think all kinds of dates would stick in your memory. Like the day your parents died, for instance. But I didn’t know how to read a calendar then, and besides, it took me a while to get just what, exactly, was going on.

After that, every day’s so fucked up, just none of them stand out.

Except January 8. January 8, Johnny told me he’d been accepted to hotshot school for math geniuses. Johnny could kill some math. He never bothered to study, but you could see it. Everything he did was perfect, like it would fit in an equation.

Like one time, because I was failing math, Johnny whipped around my book and stared at it for a few seconds, and he started pulling it all out of a hat, like a rabbit. Johnny talked, and I could see math, like colored handkerchiefs, all knotted together. I asked him where he learned all that and he said it was just all up there in his head. He said, “It’s up there in yours, too, you just ignore it.”

Anyway, I remember it was January 8 he told me he was leaving, because January 7 was the day he almost kissed me. His thumb was underneath my chin and my heart let go of all my blood at once. Tingling it all out to the edge of my skin and my knees disappeared, but it had to happen, right? I mean, after all this time?

Learning to Fly, First Lesson, by Yves Lecoq

But it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen, and the next day, he was so excited, he spun me in the air. He said I brought him good luck.

This hotshot school, it was on the wrong side of the country. I didn’t feel like good luck.

Johnny, then he started acting like he was my big brother. He got this look on his face and he said, “You’ve got to get serious.” He said, “The only way out of this place is flying.” He said, “You’ve gotta stop fucking around.”

We were in the mall, and everybody else’s life was still going on around us. Their smiling jaws were still flapping as if their stupid little town wasn’t in the process of losing its only asset.

He put his finger under my chin again, but all he did was say, “Don’t disappoint me.”

*******

by Yves Lecoq

On an earlier January 7th, the one that came the year I caught up with my age group in reading but not in math— not, my teacher pointed out, because I didn’t understand, but because I was sloppy--, my first foster mother explained to me that she was going to adopt me. “This means,” she said, “that daddy and I will be your daddy and mommy forever.”

This would mean something to me later, but at the moment, I just tried to make my expressions match hers, so she’d know I was listening.

That January 8th, my new forever mommy didn’t come home and daddy wouldn’t take his face out of his hands, and as I was watching him, a trickle of pee ran down my leg and then the policemen took me back to the station with them.

You might think all these coincidences are impossible, but you’d be wrong. All the world’s religions developed from the desire to please whatever force out there was capable of such symmetry, such perfectly ordered chaos, such endless possibilities in devastation.

Snowflakes, snowdrifts, avalanches. The perfectly patterned fur of a tiger. A volcano.

Our fear of the number 13 stems from our re-creation as a patriarchal society. 13 was good luck for the pagan goddesses. For witches. But good luck for them meant bad luck to those that came after. The number represented an order of things beneficial to the wrong party.

Seven was how many fingers I held up when I met my first new mommy. Seven was the day on the calendar she pointed to when she said, “By this time next month, it’ll be official.”

Even now, when I go to the grocery store, which isn’t often, I buy the seventh box or bag or can of whatever item on the shelf. If I ride the bus, I only sit if the seventh seat is open, that’s the first one on the driver’s side after the three vertical seats. For a long time, if I had to say something, I said it seven times, and I dug in my heels for most of the way through a second year of 7th grade, making no progress, a defense which finally caught the attention of DFACS employees who, upon investigating, found me needing three fingers and an elbow re-broken and set straight, freeing me at last from that cursed house.

*******

Tango in a Box VII

2011-04-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Chef II, by Lawrence WinramPart One is HERE.

Tango in a Box, Part 7/8

So the next time I go to see Johnny in prison, Sir’s not there, but he asks, first thing, did I find out about the anatomy classes.

Conemen, by Lawrence Winram

I tell him it takes a long goddamned time to get to anatomy class.

That’s followed by this wretched silence, and I’m racking my brain to see if I have any memories of swearing at him like that, but I don’t find any.

I cram my hands between my knees and watch them, all twisted up. It’s still quiet, I mean, between us, so I start smudging my right toe with my left toe.

Johnny says, “Sit up for chrissakes.”

My right hand is so far under my legs, it’s pulling my right shoulder across in front of me. I yank both hands up and they go straight to tuck my hair behind my ears and my ass slides down the seat until I’m almost like him.

The problem is, Sir wants organs. Not for him, for other people, like when you donate your organs. Only he’s not planning to donate.

You can see that Sir missed out on some basic biology courses. What’s going on in Johnny’s head, I don’t know.

The bodies you cut up in anatomy, well, they’ve been dead a while.

So Johnny explains to me, from his usual slouch, feet planted about hip-width apart, his ass at the edge of the seat closest to me, his hands resting on his thighs, he says, “Yeah, but someone’s gotta know how to take the organs out.”

Am I awake? My mouth wants to say something awful, you can tell by the way it flaps, by the way my brain has to perform an emergency shutdown to prevent word formation.

Regret, hope, they’re still a few steps ahead here.

And I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but what I hear come out of my mouth in the end is, “There’s an easier way.”

I’m thinking of foster mommy number three and her perfectly manicured nails and high cheekbones. Before I met her, her hairdresser had burnt the skin off the right side of her face, and the skin transplant that followed was the opening of a new vision of perfection. The drug companies, they’re greedy for meninges, those little membranes around the brain and spinal cord, just right for the medications used in those skin transplants. Next came the eye tucks, courtesy of the muscle membranes of some butchered corpse’s thighs.

Anna, by Lawrence Winram

Vital organs are so picky about when they’re taken from the body. A chunk of thigh will wait on you for a good bit of time before refusing to help out. The image of me, slicing some corpse’s thigh and digging out the muscles, is making me forget where I am.

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Of course, I have my own plan for all this, and it’s got nothing to do with anatomy. And, like I said, nothing to do with lawyers. Physics, that’s where we’re going to find our solution.

Think of everything being made up of little atoms. In humans, the atoms that make us up keep changing out. Every seven years, they're completely changed out, you're not just replacing parts, you've got a whole new car. The atoms that are in me now could later be part of you, or part of the table we’re sitting at.

Really, if you follow the panpsychic implications of all this--and that's physics panpsychic, nothing to do with Madame Belaire--, you're in a constant dynamic with all the conscious particles around you, particles residing in both animate and inanimate objects.

Technically, Johnny should be able to convince the walls to just let him pass.

I just haven't figured out the logistics yet.

Behind the Sky, There is a Wall, by Yves Lecoq

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